– By Vijayant Rai
Since ChatGPT became available publicly, the excitement, dialogue and discussion around it hasn’t died down. And this is only a preview of what is coming as we enter the Age of AI and prepare for the next platform wave that is AI. Now, more than ever, the financial services industry needs to transition to a ‘digital first’ strategy to be future-ready. Customers have already moved to digital channels during the pandemic and now expect seamless personalized experiences on these channels. And with IndiaStack enabling Open Digital Ecosystems in the industry, the next big frontier for financial services lies in strategic applications of Data and AI to drive business and customer impact.
Data is an integral pillar of digital transformation and entails defining the right data strategy, platforms, tools and processes to incorporate insights with the enterprise value chain to create value for internal and external stakeholders. AI and automation will augment capabilities to uncover new trends, patterns and opportunities and drive business resilience and growth. For example, the country’s leading private sector bank, HDFC Bank, is modernizing its enterprise data landscape to derive new business insights, leveraging low code, no code tools to modernize legacy applications and enabling secure hybrid work for its employees as part of its investment in running the bank as well as in building a future-ready bank with the goal of offering the best experience to its customers.
In another example, automation and AI are helping fusion teams consisting of domain experts and developers come together and build apps better and faster. Recently, the country’s largest bank, State Bank of India, leveraged a low code app development platform, to empower people with little or no coding experience to build apps that improved its business processes and made them more efficient.
Sam Altman, co-founder and CEO of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, recently spoke about how Morgan Stanley is building an AI assistant to help its wealth managers better support clients. The assistant combines search and content creation together, so that wealth managers can quickly find and tailor the right information for every client at any moment by using advanced AI technology to deliver deep knowledge.
Closer home, Yes Bank opted for a cloud-native approach for a mobile app to support it in scaling up various services by bringing merchants and ecosystem partners on to a common platform and which would allow it to a host of services such as shopping, rewards, offers, as well as customized dashboards, in addition to traditional banking functions.
CAMSfinserv, one of the first licensees to launch the account aggregator services for consent-based data aggregation and sharing, is using the cloud to provide users commitments on uptime and speed of delivery while also ensuring some of the most stringent standards of privacy and security.
The account aggregator ecosystem already has on boarded a billion accounts and two million plus users have already voluntarily shared their financial data with banks and financial institutions to avail products/services. This adoption is expected to grow exponentially in coming years and contribute further to a data-led economy. Digital technologies have evolved rapidly over the years, but in the last two years they have been transformative for organizations and industries. According to technology researcher Technavio, the market share of artificial intelligence (AI) in the BFSI sector will increase by USD 32.97 billion from 2021 to 2026.
For the financial services industry, which includes the likes of banks and insurance providers that are seeking more agility and digital natives like fintechs, the future is embracing the Intelligent cloud and with it some of the more advanced fraud detection, risk management and compliance measures. Historically, the financial services industry has been at the forefront of leveraging technology for its operations and it now has the power of Data & AI on Cloud to deliver better than ever business outcomes and deliver innovative customer experiences.
(Vijayant Rai is the executive director – BFSI at Microsoft India. Views expressed are the author’s own.)