From the arrival of the telephone to online banking and mobile payments, many waves of transformation have swept the banking, insurance and finance industries.
But artificial intelligence – and genetic artificial intelligence in particular – promises to be the most transformative of all.
If you’re only familiar with tools like ChatGPT and Midjourney that generate words and images, then you probably think they’re pretty cool, but you may not fully understand how they’ll change the world – or even your job!
But the truth is, it’s just the tip of a technology iceberg that will automate many routine tasks, streamline internal business processes, and enhance the way we work on a daily basis. According to one Accenture reportbanking and insurance are the two industries that are going to be affected the most.
So if you’re in the money game, read on to find out how your job will soon change, as well as some of the wider changes this could mean for society.
What is GenAI and why is it so important for finance?
The term “generative AI” (GenAI) refers to algorithm-powered tools that can generate new content based on existing data. ChatGPT may have taken the world by storm with its ability to write anything from prose and poetry to complex computer code, but its potential uses go far beyond that.
Of particular importance to banking and finance professionals is its ability to interpret data, from simple statistics to massive spreadsheets filled with vast amounts of real-time transaction information.
Instead of presenting information as complex charts or graphs that then need to be interpreted, AI can quickly highlight what’s important and what’s just noise that can be ignored. Importantly, these interpretations can be tailored to the role of the person for whom they are intended.
This means professionals will spend less time on routine information-based tasks and more time on decision-making and strategizing, as well as face-to-face business activities. A research found that 75 percent of junior financial services workers believe that up to a quarter of their workload could be automated by artificial intelligence.
So here’s a rundown of how productive AI will be embedded in specific tasks and responsibilities that are critical to sustaining the economic world!
How will Generative AI Change Finance work?
AI authoring tools will simplify transaction processing by automating many of the common tasks such as data entry, validation and reconciliation. As GenAI systems become more powerful and accurate, this will mean that banks and other financial institutions can offer faster, more reliable and perhaps even cheaper services to their customers.
All financial services institutions devote significant resources to fraud detection and prevention. This involves analyzing potentially millions of transactions and flagging those with specific characteristics that indicate fraud. GenAI can do this much faster than any human, and can also report results in a way that makes it easy for a human risk assessor to step in and understand why a particular transaction could be suspicious.
Investment management is another important element of financial services, and AI-generated algorithms can help analyze markets, evaluate the performance of companies and other assets, spot trends, and evaluate the effectiveness of investment strategies. Investment managers can then spend more time face-to-face with their clients, better understanding their needs and requirements.
Insurance underwriting is likely to be revolutionized by genetic artificial intelligence, which is able to understand and interpret information about risk, providing more detailed and accurate estimates to help insurers make more informed decisions. It can also be used to create synthetic data, which follows the patterns and rules of real-world data, to fill holes when there is not enough real-world data available.
For those working on the regulatory and compliance side of financial services, genetic AI will help analyze and interpret complex regulatory texts and legal documents. This means that banks and insurers will more quickly identify the risks of costly and damaging breaches.
Customer services will also be greatly affected by the GenAI revolution. We may have found chatbots and automated customer service systems frustrating in the past. But a new generation of chatbots like ChatGPT, powered by large language models (LLM), will answer many questions more quickly and efficiently by human operators, improving customer satisfaction and retention rates. Instead of meaning that human customer service agents are redundant, they will have more time for complex and sensitive work.
The future role of financial professionals
As productive artificial intelligence increasingly transforms information-based work across the financial industry, the role of finance professionals in society will also change.
The traditional view of the highly stressed analyst working late into the night, hunched over a screen and interpreting graphs and statistics, will hopefully become a thing of the past.
Many will find that uniquely human skills such as communication, interpersonal skills, strategic decision making and team building will become increasingly important to their career development.
The time saved by automating routine tasks can be used to build stronger relationships with customers and colleagues. In addition, there will be more opportunities to continue learning and developing skills, creating professionals able to adapt to the changing nature of their business.
This is a change that everyone, not just those in financial services, will need to prepare for. Those who embrace it now – in the relatively early years of the AI revolution – will set themselves up for more fulfilling and rewarding careers.