Revolutionizing financial services: The impact of artificial intelligence

There are no shortage of challenges in the banking industry.

From competition to personalization, the list of disruptors is long and continues to evolve.

During a webinar hosted by American Banker, Hyland VP of Financial Services Patrick Zientara said innovative banks should focus on three key priorities:

• Security and compliance

• Adapting strategies to maintain a competitive edge

• Continuing to evolve as customer preferences and expectations change

“It’s essential that we are continuing to focus on these things as we move forward,” Zientara said.

> Watch the webinar: How AI is transforming bank operations

Common roadblocks slow banks’ evolution

Transforming operations can be difficult, however, when several key factors continue to hold financial institutions back.

• Analysts have estimated that 80% to 90% of all data is unstructured.

• A Hyland-commissioned Forrester Consulting study showed that enterprise content is stored across an average of 21 systems.

• Forrester’s survey of content management decision-makers found that almost half believe their employees are spending too much time looking for the information they need.

• More than half of the decision-makers surveyed by Forrester — 52% — say most of their content isn’t AI-ready.

How can financial institutions address these challenges? Experts from Hyland and Capgemini provided insights in the American Banker webinar.

AI is already in the house and it’s modernizing the back, middle and front office, said Sumit Uppal, who heads Capgemini’s digital practice for financial services. A Capgemini customer service transformation survey showed that:

• 85% of organizations are seeing or expecting to see an improvement in first contact resolution rates through AI usage

• 89% of organizations are seeing or expecting to see a reduction in operating costs via the use of generative AI

• 82% of employees believe gen AI will lead to an enrichment of their roles because of evolved capabilities

• 70% of service employees report a reduction in overall workload due to gen AI

Key impact areas

Uppal said the impact of AI on banking is being felt in three critical areas:

• The people experience: Conversational AI and AI assistants are changing the experience for customers and employees. With the click of a button, AI can provide answers on initiating a claims process or handling a credit card dispute.

• Decision augmentation: Uppal compared AI to a magical wand that can provide insights that improve decision-making “on the fly.”

• Automation: AI is introducing an entirely new level of automation that “can do mundane activities for me very quickly,” Uppal said.

> Learn more | Automation in financial services: Real-world success stories

Impact use cases

• Know your customer (KYC): “If you look at banks, both on the retail side and the commercial and the lending side of the business, KYC has become a pretty critical activity. And it cannot be a once-a-year activity anymore because the nature of the world we’re living in is super dynamic,” Uppal said. “So can we do perpetual KYCs? How can AI help me do a lot of that almost on a regular basis?”

• Automated document processing and extraction: Formerly a tedious, manual process, AI is accelerating workflows by quickly extracting unstructured data from a variety of sources.

• Customer service and marketing: These are the most active use cases for AI in banking, Uppal said. From account management to improving the content supply chain, AI and gen AI are providing significant value.

> Watch the webinar | How AI-enabled IDP is modernizing bank operations

AI value starts in the back office

“There is still hesitation, and for all the right reasons, to let AI run wild with your customers,” Uppal said.

Instead, banks are generating impact in the back and middle office. Those areas “are going to get transformed” by AI, Capgemini’s head of digital added.

The importance of prioritization

Uppal recommends that banks start with AI use cases that provide the most value. Banks can implement high-value, low-complexity uses — such as 24/7 chatbots, AI-powered content creation and sales automation — before moving on to high-value, high-complexity uses. Examples of the latter include sales forecasting and reporting, targeting and retargeting with personalized campaigns, and transaction monitoring to ensure compliance.

> Learn more | Hyper-personalization is the future of banking experiences

To revolutionize and modernize how they do business, banks need to harness the power of their content.

The Hyland Content Innovation Cloud™ (CIC) can make the transformation possible by bringing together content, processes and applications into a single, intelligent ecosystem. The platform helps organizations unlock insights, drive automation and turn content from an untapped resource into a strategic advantage.

CIC use cases in financial services

• Banks and credit unions: Lending, account services, compliance and risk, customer and member services, internal operations

• Wealth management: Advisor support, client service and operations, compliance and supervision, training and onboarding, content and knowledge management

Unlocking the full potential of unstructured content

A key pillar of CIC is content intelligence, which leverages AI to make enterprise information discoverable, actionable and valuable. This can be accomplished via:

• Hyland Knowledge Enrichment: Transforms unstructured content into structured, high-quality content that can be used in AI-based automation and app development. Examples cited during the webinar included streamlined reviews of loans and financial statements. “We’re able to automatically evaluate that content, identify any risks and identify any action steps we need to take,” Hyland Director of Financial Services Tom Davis said.

• Hyland Knowledge Discovery: Utilizes AI agents to unlock and access relevant business insights with simple natural language queries. Financial firms can pick the AI agents that best fit their needs and get real-time results in their search for information.

• Hyland Agent Builder: Executes complex workflows by using AI agents designed to intelligently perform content-driven tasks. A potential use case mentioned by Davis is prioritizing and targeting clients with proactive, personalized campaigns that reach out to prospects, request additional information and align them with the product that best fits their needs.

> Read more | Navigating the pros and cons of unstructured data

“The use cases that we are supporting and getting into now are only really scratching the surface of what we believe we can do,” Davis said. “It’s going to revolutionize the way we build and structure processes.”

Are you ready to implement AI? Zientara listed five indicators of AI-readiness:

• Infrastructure and databases are on a modernization path.

• Your organization recognizes the value of tapping into unstructured data.

• You have an AI council with clear guidelines to mitigate risks.

• There’s support for quality AI outputs with ethical data while monitoring for bias.

• You’ve identified the skills and talent needed to build and operate AI solutions.

Many financial institutions have implemented AI, but “this is literally just the tip of the iceberg,” Zientara said.

No matter where you are on your AI journey, Hyland is here to help. Contact us today to set up a free assessment of your AI-readiness.