AI Sector Overviews Articles and Reports

Emerj Technical Advisor, German Sanchis Trilles, PhD, defines natural language processing as:
“...everything which is related to human language. If you have a system that needs to recognize what a human wrote, that’s NLP. If you have a system that tries to understand what a human said with his voice or with her voice, that’s NLP as well. If you want a system to speak and to do some speech synthesis, that’s NLP as well.

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:

In July of 2018, Daniel Faggella spoke at the Interpol--United Nations (UNICRI) Global Meeting on the Opportunities and Risks of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics for Law Enforcement. It was the very first event on the usage of AI in policing, security and law enforcement by the UN and INTERPOL. 

The retail industry could be losing nearly $1 trillion in sales annually due to business process errors that could be automated by AI, such as restocking in eCommerce. In this article, we discuss the top 3 most well-funded AI startups selling to the retail industry and how their solutions could help retailers and eCommerce sites save money lost to fraud and increase revenue through customer analytics.
Signifyd - Retail and eCommerce Fraud Detection
Signifyd is the most well-funded AI startup in the fraud detection industry for retail and eCommerce, having raised $180 million. They were founded in August 2011 and specialize in fraud detection for retail and eCommerce companies. Their most prominent offering is called “guaranteed fraud detection,” and it likely uses anomaly detection technology to recognize fraudulent transactions and prevent chargebacks. The offering was originally announced exclusively for the Magento eCommerce platform in 2017.

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.