Ruminating on the future of certain industries—how it will be shaped and how enterprises will be forced to adapt—is crucial for today’s preparation. In verticals such as financial services, these predictions are even more weighty, shedding light on how new technologies and paradigms will impact high-stakes business operations.
Featuring the expertise of OpenText thought leaders, DBTA’s webinar, The Future of Data, Analytics and AI Services in the Financial Services Industry, offered a wide array of considerations and strategies for adapting to the next evolution of financial services, aiming to turn technology and knowledge into a competitive advantage.
Monica Hovsepian, senior industry marketing strategist, OpenText, Jim Marous, content creator and banking industry influencer, and Michele Vaccaro, senior director, solutions consulting, OpenText, engaged in a roundtable discussion to examine the trends and upcoming evolutions of financial services.
The conversation began by delving into the role of intelligent automation in financial services, which has a significant place in how the financial services industry is changing.
The financial services industry is “evolving fast, and intelligent automation is playing a humongous role in shaping its future,” said Hovsepian. “Banks and financial institutions are under this constant pressure to operate more efficiently and to comply with ever-changing regulations…and provide an exceptional customer experience.”
“AI-driven automation is the key to meeting these demands,” Hovsepian continued, especially as it relates to automating the repetitive, time-consuming tasks happening within these institutions, such as data entry, transaction processing, document verification, compliance tasks, and more.
Marous added his perspective, explaining how, “I see a lot of organizations doubling down on things they’ve done before with regard to AI—fraud and risk…automation of the back office, efficiency, and effectiveness…Nothing gets a bank’s attention more than cost savings.”
“What I don't see… is deployment for the customer’s benefit—things that they can actually feel and see,” Marous noted. While enterprises spend a lot of time implementing AI to understand more about their customers, little effort goes into utilizing that knowledge to improve customers’ financial well-being through personalization or empathetic functions, argued Marous.
Vaccaro agreed on the importance of customer personalization—which he further qualified as reaching the point of hyper-personalization, or a business strategy that uses advanced technologies to deliver highly tailored experiences, products, or services based on individual customer behavior and preferences (as IBM defines). Vaccaro added that he believes that gap is slowly closing, especially with the growing popularity of agentic AI technology.
However, Vaccaro noted that those back-office automations which Marous pointed out are vital in regard to supporting the journey toward hyper-personalization.
“We need to remember that AI…can only be as good as our data,” said Vaccaro. “AI technology needs to be fed with good data and in order to have good data…it needs information governance.” Information governance enables data to be transformed and matured into valuable information, which is achieved namely through adding context. This context helps connect information to each other, thus creating knowledge—which helps AI systems perform with utmost efficacy.
This is only a snippet of the full The Future of Data, Analytics and AI Services in the Financial Services Industry webinar. For the full webinar, featuring even more discussion topics, you can view an archived version of the webinar here.