Experian, the global data and technology company held its Innovation summit, themed Unleash Your Potential and sought to address the critical demands of digital transformation, cost optimisation and Cloud adoption in the financial services industry.
In a session earlier today, the ever increasing adoption of Ai technology was addressed via a panel discussion that included Ai leaders in the sector.
Ferdie Pieterse, a digital financial innovation leader, and CEO of Experian Africa explained that “Ai will play a crucial role in lending over the coming years. Both traditional Ai and Machine Learning and GenAi are changing the credit risk assessment process, by increasing the accuracy and automation of decisions”. “Those businesses that have automated their consumer credit decisions have a considerable advantage over the competition”, he commented.
Client Interaction Improvements
CEO of Sanlam Studios and Ai system chief innovation driver, Andre Fredericks, said that the journey that Sanlam Studios had in their Ai development was to determine first, what the super power in LLM Ai’s such as Chat GPT is? “What we discovered was that It was in the language ability of Ai to create effective Bot agent language that met the expectations of our clients and learned how to deal with our customers effectively”, he stated.
The development of their Ai customer service Bot, named Coach, has according to Fredericks, resulted in vastly improved client interactions with a three times better conversion rate than that of human call centre agents.
Sanlam utilises the interaction data on an ongoing basis to improve client interactions and goes through a series of steps that distils the data down to clear answers that are not jargon or financial talk and improves interactions.
Sanlam Studio has also built three additional Ai bots that read and score the customer bot’s interactions, to create quality and control checks to ensure that the Chat bots are working effectively. There is also a product manager Ai bot that is used to improve the products on offer by understanding pain points of customers by analysing the Coach Bot chats and interactions with clients.
Ai Growth is Set to Explode in The Financial Sector
Francois Grobler, Chief of Decision Analytics at Experian, stated that “Many businesses are updating their models faster than ever before, Highlighting the critical role of modelOps in shaping the industry. Less than a quarter can push Ai models into production in less than six-months. Combining data and analytics into an end-to-end model development and deployment platform allows business to reduce this from moths to weeks.
Grobler believes that Ai will infiltrate every level of the value chain and the question is not if you should adopt but how you adopt it to integrate sooner rather than later.
New entrants into the credit supply side with private investors, looks set to bebuilding Ai models rapidly that will create credit metrics that are not based on the current financial metrics used for granting credit and will be far more agile than larger institutions and will be able to fill the gaps that Ai presents in the credit industry faster.
The panel all agreed that while there are still issues around Ai adoption that need to be addressed such as proper regulation and the control of data, the momentum currently in the industry is going to accelerate and as WIT’s Professor, Benjamin Rosman put it “It’s going to be wild”.
