AI Articles and Analysis in Finance

The thoughts and opinions expressed by the author of this piece and the interviewee, Maruf Hossain, are entirely their own and do not reflect the opinions, views, or stances of the companies at which they work.

HSBC Holdings is a multinational banking and financial services holding company and is ranked 99th on the Fortune 500 list. The bank has worked with multiple AI vendors and provided evidence of success that other top banks lack. According to our AI Opportunity Landscape research on how the top global banks are using AI, besides Deutsche Bank, HSBC is the European bank with the most AI initiatives. HSBC's AI initiatives account for 12.5% of the AI initiatives at the European banks in our analysis. 

The auto-lending industry stands to benefit from artificial intelligence in much the same way as insurance companies, particularly when it comes to underwriting and risk management. According to Deloitte, nearly $500 billion in new loans and leases are originated annually, and 86% of new car purchases rely on borrowed money. In this article, we discuss how AI startups aim to facilitate different processes within the auto-lending industry, looking to two well-funded startups as examples of what's possible in the space:

AI may have a role to play in digitizing the paper-heavy mortgage process, facilitating more streamlined search and discovery for entities across a variety of digital and scanned PDF documents. We spoke with Dan Cortright, Senior Director of Product Management at Iron Mountain, about just that. Courtright discusses how AI could help approve loans quicker, better assess risk, and allow employees to pull up documents they need to respond to customer requests.

Many of the largest US banks, including Bank of America, are starting to automate many of their business processes with AI. These include ACH payments and more specific processes such as order to cash. Bank of America has been investing seriously in AI and machine learning since at least 2017 and continues to research ways they can take advantage of AI in the future.

Much of the discussion surrounding AI in banking is focused on retail banks, with applications such as chatbots and payment fraud detection. But there exist AI capabilities that stand to benefit investment banking clients specifically as wealth management departments begin to adopt them.

Many large banks and financial institutions are beginning to digitize parts of their business processes to prepare for future initiatives in automation and machine learning. This is particularly true with loan processing. These functions could become faster and more accurate if they use digitized data that is more easily accessible than paper documents.

Financial institutions have challenges around data accessibility. They want to leverage their large amounts of data so their employees, such as customer service agents, can find the information they need quickly.