Listening Will Be Crucial to Enhance CX for Banks Through Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence

Machine learning and Artificial Intelligence are two buzz terms that could have a profound effect on the overall customer experience related to financial institutions.

These technologies are picking up steam as they make their way toward the mainstream in financial services, ultimately, making everything faster and more intuitive.

Machine learning is a subset of artificial intelligence that enables computers to learn without being explicitly programmed. With machine learning, computers can analyze new information and compare it with existing data to look for patterns, similarities, and differences.

David Gilvin, partner, banking & financial markets leader, IBM Digital Consulting, IBM, discussed this burgeoning theme during a session titled, “Machine Learning & Artificial Intelligence Powering Next Gen CX in Financial Services,” at the recent Money20/20 Conference in Las Vegas.

“AI is always on, 365, 24/7,” Gilvin said. “If the machine is making the decision, then fundamentally it is not the same as the financial adviser. It is automated through machine learning. Not only is it always on, it is everywhere. What we have to do, at least in financial services, is make people’s lives financially better.”

Why haven’t we seen this level of personalization before?

“These are organizations that are incredibly siloed,” Gilvin explained. “I describe it as a layer in the enterprise. It’s not a chatbot. The real layer aspect is being able to plug into that. It’s constantly understanding, reasoning, and learning. Every interaction becomes an opportunity for data solicitation, data collection, data verification. We need to be mindful of how we use that. The accessibility of it is just astounding.”

This is where, Gilvin said, listening will be a crucial component in enhancing the overall customer experience for customers of financial institutions.

“What we’re going to start seeing, particularly in use cases or journeys or experiences about gaining trust providing a service, will be that listening is just as important as providing data insight,” Gilvin said.

During the conference, Bank of America announced the launch of its AI-driven ‘Erica’ assistant. Erica is billed as a potential game changer for how customers interact with their banks digitally. Using cognitive messaging and AI, it searches for ways to save you money and sends you a text message to let you know about it.

“Human beings have to teach some things back to the machine,” Featurespace CEO Martina King said. “We’re not at the stage yet where machines will completely take over. We have to keep experimenting to work out where we can really make a massive difference through understanding the behavior of people with data.”

King said that machine learning can effectively track behavioral patterns.

“We can follow everything at an event level in the data set and start to separate out what’s good and what’s bad,” she said. “That’s the point where you can say that this person would never behave this way. Let’ investigate further. Financial services data is absolutely the best kind of data we like to work with.”

Dr. Arif Ahmed, SVP, payments innovation, U.S. Bank, said that “with deep learning, you have better ways to conceptualize problems. We have reached a point where this will exponentially increase over the next few years.”

In the future, many consumer-facing products, including chatbots, will make their way into digital services.
Gilvin offered a practical example where a customer might interact with a financial adviser who’s been on the job for a month versus another customer interacting with a financial adviser who has been in the business for 27 years.

“We de-risk the situation by institutionalizing that knowledge in the form of machine learning,” Gilvin said. “We’re not trying to take human beings out of this situation. When we think about financial  services, people want to provide their data in the context of what makes their overall experience better. They view that experience that we have to create for them as something that should permeate all aspects of their lives.”

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