AI shapes up new banking ecosystem

I have never seen banking this automated with the advent of big data analytics and integration between multiple banking systems. But with advances in AI implementation in banking ecosystem, banks have started accomplishing more than just core banking capabilities. They are expanding their functionalities.

The Banking Ecosystem come in many different variants as per their area of use and functionalities they provide. How many ways can AI transform banking?

• Customer Relationships: Chat bots on banking websites and apps across different channels can be an excellent customer facing and handling agents. AI enabled bots can easily answer questions that the consumers have by retrieving relevant information in no time.
• Finance Management: With machine learning put into use, any available data on customer spending and savings, the algorithms can assess the financial health of consumers, and can devise budgeting plan and saving goals for them, even alert customers while spending.
• Wealth Management: Robo-advisors are the latest trend in AI development, which interests me most. When used in banking, these algorithm-driven agents can learn about consumers’ goals, sentiment and financial status, and create a personalized investment plan for them, as well as help them in taking rational decisions.
• Sales & Marketing: The best form of AI usage is in upselling and cross selling of financial products. While communicating with customers, AI can gain lots of insights from the conversation, and can pitch in appropriate financial products to the customers instantly.
• Fraud Prevention: Algorithms work with pattern recognition, and hence using this feature, the AI programs can easily detect anomaly in certain financial behaviour of consumers and can alert or stop fraud in the first place.
• Cyber-Security: An efficient AI can tackle unethical hacking, and cyber-crimes, and prevent bank from getting robbed online.
• Core Banking System: Banks can implement AI in their own back-end functions, to analyse their business processes, financial projections, organizational functioning and can bring insights on how to improve or enhance business capabilities.

I feel AI can innovate and disrupt banking ecosystem, but banks in turn should start thinking about integrating more data from other sources by opening up to integration with other business platforms using API, to make the transformation happen successfully.