When we say, “Alexa, help me grow my business,” you know who we’re talking to, right? This well-known virtual assistant is part of millions of households around the globe; and it’s not the only one. AI-powered voice assistants are set to reach 8 billion units by 2023.

Wouldn’t it be great if these handy assistants could actually help us grow our businesses? Well, guess what? They can.

By 2025, the global AI market is expected to be almost $60 billion. According to Accenture, AI technology can enhance business productivity by up to 40%. There are many industries benefiting from the huge growth in AI innovation, and financial services is one of them.

According to Statistica, 87% of business organizations will adopt AI because it gives them a competitive advantage over their rivals. As the fintech industry booms and consumers are given more finance and banking options, companies need to stay on top of innovation to remain competitive. How can AI help you achieve that?

From business process performance to overarching corporate protection, AI is a day-to-day, BAU tool that extracts the greatest ROI from your organization’s most valuable investment—your employees. AI is the element that enables your teams to work smarter, not harder. AI is also the element that bolsters cybersecurity strategies protecting your information, IT, and customers from the inevitable incursion by bad actors. Customer touch points are also appealing applications of AI, making AI an essential part of the operational environment.

Here are seven ways that smart AI can help improve the efficiency of your organization, support business growth, and reduce costs:

1.) Chatbots: Improve Customer Service with Instant Help

 Chatbots have become a widely used tool. Chatbots provide 24/7 intelligent customer support that can quickly resolve typical customer needs while reducing support costs. Automating customer service interactions saves time and money and improves customer satisfaction. Providing chatbots in multiple languages is vital for supporting your non-English-speaking customer base. Additionally, it can result in cost-savings on translation and interpretation.

2.) Streamline Credit Card and Loan Approval Processes

 Analyzing extra factors outside of credit history can help grow the funnel of creditworthy customers. AI helps to analyze and categorize things such as social media posts or website content, which can increase an engine’s ability to rate a customer’s tendency toward responsibility.

3.) Leverage AI for Fraud Prevention

 As fraudsters become more advanced, so must financial organizations’ fraud detection. It is their responsibility to do everything they can to protect their customer’s money.

This often means sifting through vast amounts of data to identify unusual patterns in behavior, purchasing habits, and transaction locations—all of which can be time-consuming and costly. AI provides a time-saving and cost-effective way for finance companies to quickly see abnormalities that identify fraudulent activity.

4.) Use Robotic Process Automation (RPA)

The human power required to run repetitive, task-based processes is expensive—and, frankly, a waste of talent. Automating processes (or at least steps in processes) and enabling AI capabilities for actions that are busy work for your most valuable assets—your people—allows you to increase productivity, value, and scale, shifting the application from that of raw horsepower to brainpower. Risk and compliance departments are enabling bots and AI tech to test full sets of data, not just samples, in their monitoring and control activities. Production departments leverage OCR, bots, routing logic to speed up case completion times and reduce re-work. In both cases, AI frees up the human element to work escalated, complex, and nuanced instances that require judgment that only people can deliver.

5.) Compliance Issues: Correct Mislabeled or Unlabeled Data

The financial services industry is one of the most regulated in the world; it’s important for companies to meet all compliance obligations. AI can make this process easier by identifying patterns and extracting relevant data from contracts, forms, applications, etc., via labeling. It can not only identify but also correct mislabeled or unlabeled data.

6.) Detect Cybersecurity Attacks

In the vein of monitoring for fraud against customers, similar AI principles are adopted in monitoring corporate IT infrastructure to protect from increasingly sophisticated cyber attacks. Models that assess the risk of breaches and security of endpoints and take on the onslaught of bots used by bad actors are as essential in protecting the bank from harm as the protections deployed at the customer/account level. The odds are less IF and more WHEN and HOW SEVERE when it comes to cybersecurity incidents. As corporate systems expand and become more capable, they also become more complicated to monitor and protect.

7.) Provide Virtual Assistants Who Speak Your Customer’s Language

As we mentioned earlier, AI-powered voice assistants are becoming a normal part of our everyday lives. For finance customers, they can help to check bank balances, schedule payment reminders, and do numerous other tasks. As with chatbots, it’s important to provide virtual assistants in your customer’s language to ensure a seamless brand experience and avoid any miscommunication (which is vital when managing finances).

At TransPerfect, we provide secure and reliable AI services for exceptional structured data and customer experiences. To learn more about smart AI for financial services or to explore how DataForce can help you achieve your goals, take a look at our case studies or get in touch.