3 Benefits of AI in Financial Services

Automation and AI are often feared as an imminent replacement for humans in multiple sectors, finance included. And, while there are areas where specific roles could become redundant in the future, more often than not, AI applications can be used to create an enormous, positive impact on the finance industry, helping humans, rather than replacing them. Not only can artificial intelligence help automate mundane manual tasks, but it can also help to prevent fraud and improve your overall customer experience, to name just a few of the benefits.

Here we cover three of the main benefits AI can bring to your financial services organization.

AI can automate manual work

Automating manual work is such a clear-cut benefit for professional financial services. With AI handling mundane, repetitive tasks, financial professionals are free to pursue higher-value tasks, such as cultivating deeper relationships with their customers.

Let’s consider the example of processing a credit card application. In this example, a new customer submits an application, which the bank must then enter into its systems, review, and verify. After this is done, a risk score is calculated for each applicant. It is probably safe to say that no one particularly enjoys spending their day carrying out these kinds of lengthy, repetitive processes — a classic example of AI stepping in.

By relying on AI technology for data entry, review, and verification, financial institutions can reduce the time necessary to approve an application while increasing accuracy by avoiding human error. AI in finance, therefore, accelerates customer onboarding and satisfaction, allowing financial professionals to spend more of their time handling strategic higher-value tasks.

AI can quickly identify and prevent fraud

Today’s fraudsters and fraud rings continue to become more sophisticated, making it harder for fraud protection and detection. Perpetrators also often coordinate their efforts and conduct seemingly normal transactions across different regions to minimize the risk of exposure. With all these complexities, humans just aren’t capable of quickly identifying suspicious behavior or transactions that are buried in millions of other legitimate transactions.

This is where AI becomes invaluable. In the case of fraud detection, an AI model is trained on large amounts of data — both static customer information and dynamic transaction data — to recognize suspicious behaviors and patterns.

The first benefit of using AI for this purpose is that the process becomes much quicker. After an AI system is trained to identify irregular events, it can quickly assess new transactions by comparing them with known patterns and spot the smallest anomalies, so humans don’t need to sink hours into processing and analyzing millions of transactions.

A second major benefit is improved accuracy by significantly reducing false positives and false negatives. A well-designed AI system is constantly refined through ongoing model training with fresh data and new classifications, so it becomes smarter over time. As a result, AI does an exponentially better job of correctly identifying abnormal behavior than any human could, and it, therefore, helps financial services organizations reduce fraud risk and costs, all while enhancing customer satisfaction.

AI can ultimately drive a better customer experience

Finally, AI can also be used to deliver a more personalized experience to customers. Think about financial advisors scheduling a call to review market conditions and give recommendations on where a customer should invest their money. It’s certainly helpful, but it probably isn’t tailored as closely to a customer’s unique investment needs as it could be.

AI can help financial advisors offer more customized investment recommendations based on the analysis of comprehensive, relevant customer data, including the customer’s personal information and behavioral data in and outside of the financial organization. With AI-driven customized intelligence delivered right at the point of customer interaction, financial advisors can deliver personalized services that drive better financial results for each individual customer.

Using artificial intelligence in finance, therefore, improves customer service and customer lifetime value.

Omnichannel experience is one of the top priorities for all financial firms. In order to deliver a consistent, seamless customer experience across all channels — direct or digital — a financial organization can leverage machine learning to facilitate a holistic approach. For example, for a retail bank that offers its services through both brick & mortar and online channels across various business units, AI can quickly act on the consolidated customer data from the bank’s internal and external systems with personalized service and recommendations, and ensure a seamless customer experience across all business channels.

AI opportunities open up human opportunities

The role of AI in the finance industry is clear; in aiding humans, rather than replacing them, and with so many opportunities for AI to enhance organizations, it should be embraced, not feared, by financial professionals. Its positive benefits are numerous and include; freeing finance professionals from time spent manually processing information, providing relevant recommendations for business users to better engage with their clients, and facilitating deeper customer relationships, all contributing to tangible business outcomes.

As more and more finance organizations are now beginning to see the benefits of AI, it is quickly becoming a must-have rather than a nice-to-have.

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