Artificial Intelligence Increases Efficiency and Accuracy for Financial Organizations

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is quickly becoming one of the most important technologies for financial companies of all types. The ability to respond faster than people, to automate processes through AI, enables companies to do more with less and expand their operations. They are also able to offer more advanced – and more timely – services. And when automation can scale with an organization, this can completely transform day-to-day operations.

Efficiency through AI and Technology

AI enables financial companies to automate many routine processes. Consider Trintech, a global company that provides specialized accounting software. Through its investment in AI running on Dell EMC PowerEdge servers powered by Intel Xeon processors, Trintech has been able to utilize bots for routine accounting and financial services. This in turn has tripled the number of customers the company is able to serve.

The right technology can magnify the efficiency boost from AI. Trintech, for example, achieved a 350% increase in the work done by infrastructure and operations teams through the automation and operational efficiency provided with Dell EMC OpenManage Enterprise globally. Trintech also experienced a 700% increase in IOPS by leveraging Dell EMC vSAN Ready Nodes in an all-flash solution. Together, AI and the right technology create a powerful combination.

AI enables companies to respond faster to protect customers. Consider credit card fraud. Reports of credit card fraud increased by 44 percent between 2019 and 2020 according to the Federal Trade Commission. With the trillions of dollars credit card companies flow through their systems, they are prime targets for fraud. Identifying – and preventing – fraud is critical to the bottom line, and to customer satisfaction.

Automation through AI enables credit card companies to make billions of credit and fraud risk decisions in real-time. Being able to quickly identify anomalies and respond faster than fraudsters is essential to protecting customers. But that’s only part of the equation. Making an accurate decision is essential as well. 

Accuracy through AI

Customers who can’t complete a transaction because it has been declined or who have their card flagged for fraud in a false positive get annoyed or even embarrassed. Hundreds of successful transactions can lead to brand damage and potential customer defection. These back-end operations can have a severe front-end customer impact.

Accuracy must be a primary consideration with automation. This means larger data sets, real-time analytics, and dynamically adaptive algorithms. To achieve this, financial companies need a high-performance computing platform that provides not just the real-time performance they need but that can scale over time as the volume of data and transactions continues to increase.

American Express started using AI back in 2020. In 2015, it converted all of its risk management models over to AI. These AI models cover the entire customer life cycle, starting with new account origination to limit assignment through day-to-day management and fraud detection. The initial deployment of AI improved the company’s digital resolution rate for fraud by 100%.

To date, American Express is operating using its tenth major iteration of its global fraud detection model. This model is built using both generative adversarial networks (GANs) and sequential recurrent neural networks (RNNs) to process risk decisions. For 13 years, American Express has come out as the lowest in the fraud space. Their lead isn’t just in front of the competition but by half again as much. 

Advanced AI also makes it possible to improve accuracy in ways simply not feasible with manual processes. For example, when a questionable transaction is initiated, the AI system can reach out to the customer to confirm the transaction through a trusted device such as a cell phone. Real-time communication like this not only improves fraud detection, it also increases customer confidence.

The lifeblood of AI is data. The more data a financial company has access to – and the more analytics they can process in real-time – the more accurate the results can be. And when combined with the right technology, companies can dynamically change to meet the new challenges opportunity brings.

Learn more about how AI can bring greater efficiency and accuracy to day-to-day financial operations at HPC and AI on Wall Street and explore Dell Technologies connected finance.