Event Title: BankAI 2019

Event Host: American Banker

Date: October 7, 2019 – October 8, 2019

Presentation Title: Separating Hype from ROI: An AI Deep Dive

Team Member: Daniel Faggella, Emerj Founder and CEO

What Happened

Emerj CEO Daniel Faggella keynoted Bank AI 2019. During his presentation, he shared three main takeaways from Emerj’s AI in banking research:

• A discussion on which AI applications in banking are hype and touted to be delivering a stronger ROI than they actually are.
• A deep-dive into the highest ROI AI applications in banking today, taken fro our AI in Banking Vendor Scorecard and Capability Map report.
• A breakdown of how to filter through AI vendors and make safe assumptins as to which will deliver a return and which are more hype.

After the presentation, Dan pivoted the conversation over to speaking with Lee Smallwood, COO Markets & Securities at Citi North America. Lee joined Dan up on stage, and Dan ased him some questions about why banks are focused on risk applications and whether that’s a good or bad thing. They then both took questions from the audience about AI ROI in banking and our research.

What we Learned

• Banks are interested in an AI plan forward. Dan talked about one of the key takeaways from our research: the real areas of AI traction are in areas like compliance, fraud, and cybersecurity, and much of the audience was interested in how bankers expand from that mindset of incremental improvement and risk to transforming banking and rethinking systems. It was nice to see that a lot of folks are understanding that AI is transformative as a new technology paradigm.

• The ethical concerns around AI in banking are still rather obscure.  A lot of presentations were around transparency and algorithmic bias. This may be good, but it’s clear that they aren’t really pressing concerns in banking right now. Most banks are merely experimenting with and piloting AI, so it’s outside the grasp of what banks are doing right now.

Header Image Credit: American Banker