A roundup of recent news items highlighting ways financial services companies are employing AI, with takeaways that can help ACA members chart their own path.
05/21/2024 2:30 P.M.
3 minute read
Artificial intelligence is transforming the financial services industry. Recent news coverage highlights how banks and fintech firms are increasingly adopting AI technologies to improve efficiency, personalize services, and detect fraudulent activities, with takeaways that might be helpful as your plan your own AI additions.
Check out this roundup of some ways financial services companies are using AI applications:
Fintech Firm Klarna Says 90% of its Employees Are Using Generative AI Daily
“Swedish financial technology company Klarna said Tuesday that nearly 9 out of 10 employees in its 5,000-strong workforce are now using generative artificial intelligence tools in their daily work. Klarna, which lets individuals split their purchases into interest-free, monthly installments, said over 87% of its employees are using generative AI tools, including OpenAI’s ChatGPT and its own internal AI assistant. The biggest users of generative AI in the company are those in non-technical groups, such as communications (92.6%), marketing (87.9%) and legal (86.4%), Klarna said. At those rates, Klarna is seeing much higher adoption of generative AI within the company than in the broader corporate world.”
TD Bank Group Using Gen AI in Call Centers
“When contact [center] colleagues require support to answer a customer inquiry, they seek the advice of supervisory support teams. This process can lead to longer hold times. TD developed a generative AI virtual assistant that, once implemented, is designed to help contact [center] colleagues retrieve answers to these day-to-day banking inquiries in seconds, resolving them in a shorter amount of time. Layer 6 helped develop the generative AI virtual assistant and train it alongside colleagues with a deep understanding of TD policies and procedures. The generative AI virtual assistant provides summarized responses using conversational language to contact [center] colleagues, including links to the TD policies and procedures used to source its answers. Colleagues can reference them and complete the necessary next steps to answer customer inquiries faster.”
BNPL Fintech Affirm Says Gen Z Loves Generative AI-powered Customer Service Chat
“CEO Max Levchin said recent tests the company conducted with generative AI suggest that young adults would rather resolve customer-service questions with an intelligent chatbot than with a human agent. The company’s goal is to use gen AI to ‘prework’ a lot of routine customer inquiries so that human agents who are experts can readily answer more complex questions. ‘Gen Z consumers really love chatting versus calling and they have no problem chatting with an AI, especially if the AI is intelligent,’ Levchin told analysts during a conference call this week to discuss earnings for the quarter ended March 31, 2024.”
Identity Theft is Being Fueled by AI & Cyber-Attacks
“The shift towards digital platforms has revolutionized financial transactions, but it has also fueled a surge in fraudulent activities, particularly identity theft cases that are driven by cyber-attacks. Cybercriminals, leveraging stolen identity information, have devised sophisticated schemes, complicating fraud mitigation efforts. And with the frequency of cybersecurity incidents on the rise each year, organizations face a mass of threats like ransomware and data theft, posing significant challenges across industries.
The average cost of a data breach reached an all-time high of $4.45 million in 2023, and now, artificial intelligence (AI) has led to a significant increase in the sophistication of cybercrime. From deepfake technology to AI-powered hacking, cybercriminals are exploiting these advancements to orchestrate unique attacks.”
Read the full blog post here.
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