The Australian: Cognizant’s Head of Banking and Financial Services in ANZ Says Artificial Intelligence is Turning Traditional Banking on its Head

“The accelerating pace of digital change is set to disrupt every industry — none more so than the banking and financial services industry, given the sector’s high daily volume of commercial and retail transactions,” writes Carlo Lacota. “In particular, AI is set to spur monumental change in value generation, as financial services companies expand their reach beyond traditional arsenals of price and product features.” Excerpts:

“We are experiencing an era of ‘hyper-personalization,’ which requires powerful AI structures to underpin complex customer journeys and extract insights from mountains of customer data.

Empowering a singular, seamless, and synchronous interaction with customers is now a vital business operative, irrespective of the industry. In the banking and financial services industry, AI is the technological tool that will achieve this personalization of the customer journey at scale.

The work ahead for financial services companies is to move beyond traditional transactional relationships and embrace a new standard of providing highly personalized and integrated services to their customers.

AI is leading the charge on turning traditional banking on its head, as it accelerates the pace of modernization in middle and back-office operations. No longer is the focus on interactions in the physical store or branch, or even a ‘mobile-first’ approach, which for many years was heralded as the Holy Grail to digital transformation.

Now, banks and financial services firms are looking to build new customer experiences and automated processes on top of secure and scalable technology. The industry is investing in innovative technology such as chatbots, robo-advisers, and voice-recognition software at a fast clip.

AI has the capability to intelligently learn about customers in real time, and this data can be used to create authentic, personalized relationships with a target audience.

Chatbots in particular are a technology that will aid banking in becoming much more personalized. Commonplace actions consumers take for granted today, such as doing a simple search for home loan options or submitting online inquiries will soon be replaced with conversation-based interfaces and responses from automated chatbots. These chatbots interpret customer data and provide insights and personalized recommendations instantly, with a level of personalization impossible to achieve at scale with human interactions. Any complex queries or interactions will still continue to be handled by humans, thereby providing multi-layered structures to deliver customized experiences to clients.

A blend of humanity and technology is what makes AI so powerful.”

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