By Avtar Dhillon, Director, Business Value Consulting, ThoughtSpot
“It’s not that we have little time, but more that we waste a good deal of it” – Seneca.
Time is precious. Time lost cannot be regained. There are a lot of sayings about the fleeting nature of time. Right now, time is flying. In a volatile market where enterprises might need billions in revenue just to stand still there is a pressing need to understand how to compete and build back better as we go into 2021. Take the mortgage market. Lenders lost billions of pounds when lockdown stopped the housing market.
A report conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit found this year that while AI adoption is widely in use by most financial institutions, 86% of banks and insurance companies plan to increase AI-related investment into technology by 2025. The research was drawn from retail and investment banks and insurance companies across Europe, APAC, and the US.
One of the main reasons for this adoption comes down to time. Analytics and AI can support smarter financial industry planning, and shave time off every activity in order to beat competition and extract maximum value from the market where possible. It’s an important consideration as many financial services firms find themselves in an uncertain position post-Brexit and during the global pandemic. The future is uncertain, markets are volatile, and businesses, consumers, and the government have all been adjusting to changing circumstances. AI is held by financial sector firms as the technology with the potential to help them maintain competitiveness in this uncertainty.
The Economist study found that while there is a strong degree of confidence in the benefits of AI, the reality is that the technology is not yet largely in use: More than half of respondents say AI is not incorporated into their processes and offerings, with only 15% saying the technology is used extensively across the organisation. However, the benefits that have already emerged combined with respondents’ plans to double down on AI investment in the short-term show this technology is slated to drive a massive wave of future growth for financial services.
Banks and insurance companies perceive AI as critical to unlocking new growth opportunities and reducing costs. Respondents were clear AI will transform businesses in a number of ways over the next five years, including spurring new products and services (27%), opening new markets (25%), and paving the way for innovation (25%). About one-third (29%) expect between 51% and 75% of their workloads to be supported by AI technologies in five years.
In addition to driving growth, AI promises significant savings today and in the future: 37% reported that their organisation has reduced operational costs as a result of AI adoption, and 34% predict that AI will lower their cost base over the next five years. When it comes to other benefits, one-third of respondents each reported a greater use of predictive analytics (34%), increased employee capacity to handle workload volume (33%), and enhanced customer service and satisfaction (32%).
Investment and retail banks emerge as AI leaders
Investment banks are deploying a higher volume of new AI applications on average when compared to retail bank and insurance peers. They are also the most advanced in the implementation of training programmes: 54% have already implemented initiatives, compared with 46% in insurance and 48% in retail banks. Additionally, investment banks are most likely to use machine learning (63%) and image analysis (52%), whereas retail banks are more heavily deploying predictive analytics (71%) and virtual assistants (61%).
The report also found that banks and insurers in APAC are trendsetters when it comes to adoption, training and measurement. 61% reported that half or more of their workload is supported by AI, compared with North America and Europe (both 41%). Europe’s low usage is partly a reporting problem: Almost 10% either had no metrics to measure AI-application success, or had not been measured for long enough to report on. By way of contrast, all APAC respondents had functional reporting metrics. Notably, APAC prioritises reskilling and training initiatives, with 75% expecting an increased investment in people over the next five years to learn more AI skills and arm them with resources compared to 59% in North America and 37% in Europe.
The path forward: Upskilling frontline knowledge workers
Despite relatively slow adoption rates to date, the promise of AI holds clear with 86% of respondents saying they plan to increase AI-related investments into the technology over the next five years. However, greater AI adoption will ultimately be driven by how much financial services organisations invest into upskilling their workforce. This upskilling is required to get real value from democratising insights.
According to the data, the industry is at a halfway point when it comes to upskilling their employees, with 49% of respondents saying training initiatives for employees to better understand AI are currently in place. Another 42% have plans to implement such training.
With cost reduction plans working (for over a third) or forecast (another third) using AI, as the data shows, the way ahead revolves around driving new growth. AI is seen to be the new growth engine, and the key to unlocking its potential requires investing in talent. Financial services companies must lower the technology barrier for ordinary employees to capitalise on the productivity and innovation gains made possible by AI. This is the end goal for most of the financial services industry, and many others – to be able to react at the speed of thought to changing conditions, markets, and information – bringing us back to the point: Making the best use of time, because getting to understanding has not been a fast process in the history of business intelligence.
