AI Articles and Analysis in Finance

Ten years into the longest economic expansion on record, auto lenders are looking for ways to leverage new opportunities for growth and risk reduction.

Our research indicates that AI applications for risk-related banking functions are more numerous than applications for other business areas. Fraud and Cybersecurity, Compliance, Loans and Lending, and Risk Management collectively made up 56% of the AI vendor products in the banking industry, as shown in the graph below:

In the banking sector, supervisory organizations create and oversee the compliance rules that banks and other financial organizations need to follow. These compliance regulations are important for companies to carefully abide by, since non-compliance can potentially result in large fines or in extreme cases, even loss of banking licenses. 

We interviewed Jay Budzik, CTO at Zest AI, about the business value of machine learning for auto lending. We speak with Budzik about how underwriting, lending, and credit scoring is evolving as a result of advances in machine learning - both in terms of new data sources, and more advanced algorithms.

The financial services sector has been one of the early adopters of data science and AI technologies. That said, financial firms that have engaged in AI projects will have realized that they require a deep understanding of data management and skilled data science professionals to solve these complex problems.

Speech recognition is an AI technology that can allow software programs to recognize spoken language and convert it to text. A subset of speech recognition is voice recognition. Voice recognition is an AI-enabled capability that enables a software algorithm to match the identity of a customer to their voice. 

Artificial intelligence is transforming a variety of banking functions and allowing tech startups to compete with some of the largest banks for market share of key services, including lending and wealth management. Business news and media sites have been heralding the downfall of the banking industry as we know it because fintech companies are going to feel comfortable leveraging AI long before banks.

Our sector-wide research suggests that natural language processing (NLP) is one of the more common AI approaches in banking AI use-cases today. Sentiment analysis is a capability of NLP which involves the determining whether a segment of open-ended natural language text (which can be transcribed from audio) is positive, negative, or neutral towards the topic being discussed.