In recent years, the banking industry has experienced a digital overhaul on a global scale, bringing with it the first strands of an increasing technological disruption. Even before the banking industry began to feel the gravitational pull of modernisation, it was projected to be the industry that would benefit the most from AI system incorporation and automation over the coming years. In fact, by 2030, it is predicted that AI alone will save the worldwide banking industry more than $1 trillion US dollars. Even as little as ten years ago, there was not a strong pull for the banking industry to begin incorporating technological innovation and certain digitalisation into its midst. At that point, the average consumer was not nearly as dependent on technology as the modern consumer is today. As time moved on, however, consumers began to become more digitally dependent as the world became so, and all industries that wanted to not only survive, but thrive in this new world had to rethink their internal methods and models – including the banking industry.
When technology began to infiltrate the global banking industry, it was set in motion in seemingly small ways. We noticed what banks now had websites where we could look at our bank accounts, and even transfer in and out of them. Then came the revolution of mobile banking – the next natural extensive evolution on website access for banking customers. Immediate bank-to-bank transfers began to find their way into the system, spreading like wildfire. Technological evolution had well and truly made its way into the international banking sector. With so much innovation happening all around us, people wondered how technology could or would be able to further innovate the banking industry. The whole point of digitising anything is to make it cleaner, easier, smarter, faster, stronger…better. All these digital evolutions in banking did have impact, and they have changed banking for the better. But that isn’t even the best part. Not by a long shot.
AI (artificial intelligence) is disrupting industries the world over these days in often explosive ways. In the case of the banking industry, AI has recently been estimated to save the international banking industry more than $1 trillion US dollars by the year 2030. That is an astronomical figure to predict having impact. And yet, that is where we are. That is the power of AI – even now. Especially for the larger banks, there is the issue of customer success burden. What this means is that, the more accounts there are at a bank, the more there is to juggle and the more there is to be constantly fed through the one industry reel to keep things running smoothly and the customers happy. Naturally, something like industry automation and intelligent machine input is appealing to anyone who deals with these aspects of the bank. AI refers to any intelligent machine that is configured to detect and/or improve something, in one way or another. In this case, the first initial scopes of AI in banking are (not unlike other industries, including online retail) the use of chatbots.
The chatbot function offers a level of personalised, round-the-clock customer service that banking has not previously been privy to on a smooth scale. In allowing for chatbots to be implemented, this saves the bank considerable money by taking away the necessity of having to hire hundreds, even thousands, more employees to keep it all running smoothly. You do not have to pay robots. Banks have begun to use AI – like the chatbot function – to increase client satisfaction, improve efficiency, and maintain customer loyalty in multiple ways. Over time, chatbot functionality will expand to include AI capabilities that can work towards fraud detection and anti-money laundering, saving the banks even more money and increasing consumer trust tenfold in the process. The future of the global banking industry is here, and there is nowhere to go but up from here on out.
The banking industry the world over has experienced something of a complete digital overhaul in recent years. This is not something that is unique to the banking industry – it happened everywhere, over the course of a few years. The digital revolution was a global revitalisation that promised smarter, better, faster, stronger systems, processes, and general aspects of life, both now and into the future. In the world of banking, this revolution is still under way. The introduction of digitalisation in banking concepts – like mobile banking and bank-to-bank automatic transfers – started off impressive but nonetheless relatively small scale, and ballooned to become what we are currently seeing begin to infiltrate global banking…artificial intelligence and widespread automation of banking systems and processes. This is the beginning of phase two of digitalising the banking industry the world over, and it is impressive and promising, to say the least.