For transformation, financial services providers are using AI and analytics services enabled by cloud
For businesses including the companies in Banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI) industry, cloud became the bedrock. No business is 100 per cent resilient is what the pandemic has taught. Migrating to the cloud is now inevitable as organisations from government to enterprises to start-ups are already doing innovation and transformation using cloud. Those businesses that are fortified by digital are more agile, more resilient, and more capable of transformation when faced with a crisis.
The year 2021 seems like a big year for cloud as priorities for businesses are to enable remote work, leverage cloud innovation, and maximize their existing on-premises investments.
As speed, agility, and collaboration have become more important than ever, every organization and every industry will increasingly need to ramp up tech intensity in the year ahead. A fundamental thing to have is an always-on cloud-driven data. Also, flexibility and future-proof strategies for seamless communication and workforce productivity are a must.
A new generation of Software as a Service (SaaS) will be seen emerging businesses increasingly use it for a turnaround time, which is shorter for products and services, automation of back-end tasks for effective resource allocation and stronger customer engagement.
The promise of artificial intelligence (AI) is a holistic transformation. Cloud services, layered with AI, are helping organisations to become more efficient, strategic, and data driven. The combo of cloud and AI not just offers agility, scalability, and cost savings, but also the ability to analyse and unlock insights from data and better predictive capabilities. This helps in enabling real-time decisions, smoother workflows, increased resilience, and better customer experiences.
To reduce the cost of on-boarding and assessing customers, financial services providers, for transformation, are using AI and analytics services enabled by cloud. To speed up decisions with rapid risk analysis, and to enable employees make quicker and more informed decisions for the clients, banks are taking help of cloud and AI. Automated credit and risk assessment of customers, automated claims processing using video and image analytics, faster restructuring of loans using advanced analytics are the other areas of transformation.
In banks, AI is helping to enhance existing processes, helping amalgamate and reduce process breaks. For example, to automatically fill application forms, OCR and speech analytics are being used, to automate KYC, video is being deployed and BOTs are servicing customers at scale and reducing call centre loads. To accelerate transformation, most of these AI solutions use pre-trained models and services already available on cloud and can be productized easily via customer specific training. Also, banks and customers are coming close to each other than ever before by features like e-digital payments & lending powered by cloud and AI.
Not only accelerating digital transformation of banks but also cloud and AI are of a genuine help to expand the business reach and agility and will automatically start showing positive impact. By eliminating the challenges in deploying, operating and maintaining complex IT systems, AI and SaaS integration plays a key role in facilitating quicker adoption of transformation to technology. There has been a rise in the number of SaaS players with adoption taking off in verticals like finance, healthcare and education. Without additional investment in infrastructure, organizations using SaaS can deploy AI capabilities end-to-end. Also, SaaS’ pay-as-you-go nature is of a help to drive cost efficiencies.
To assist customers with their requirements and issues, AI-driven SaaS chatbots converse with them proactively. Also, to gain insight into customer’s behaviour, predict trends, and plan service offerings accordingly, AI tools can crunch customer data. Extending to areas like email, collaboration and calendaring and sophisticated management of business applications and document are the capabilities of AI. Also, seamless security of apps and organizational data is ensured by AI in SaaS.
With transformation the BFSI industry can improve productivity and enable faster time-to-market with new products and services, for which the industry has been a frontrunner in adopting AI and cloud capabilities. This is evident in the expedition of digital banking in India’s financial services sector in the past few years, and more so in the last several months.
The BFSI companies will be able to reimagine their business from front-end to back-end making financial services more accessible than before with the convergence of AI integrated cloud services. However, they’ll need to have a clear and long-term vision on what they intend to achieve after transformation. And the strategy must be grounded in trust and responsibility. Ensuring that AI systems are fair, reliable and safe, private and secure, inclusive, transparent and accountable, clear principles must be adopted in developing and deploying AI ethically.
Also Read: Digitally transforming businesses: Imaginea becomes a part of Accenture
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