AI Articles and Analysis in Finance

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.

Investment in AI by banks and financial institutions for risk-related functions such as fraud and cybersecurity, compliance, and financing and loans has grown dramatically in the last half-decade compared to customer-facing functions.

Banks are in one of the best positions for leveraging AI in the coming years because the largest banks have massive volumes of historical data on customers and transactions that can be fed into machine learning algorithms. We recently completed our Emerj AI in Banking Vendor Scorecard and Capability Map in which we explored which AI capabilities banks were taking advantage of the most and which they might be able to leverage in the future.

Event Title: The launch of our Emerj AI in Banking Vendor Scorecard and Capability Map 2019 report