The banking sector will be one of the biggest beneficiaries of the widespread use of artificial intelligence and machine learning in the coming years, predicts SAS. Experimentation and solution exploration in this field is therefore crucial to fully harness its potential. The Global ING Hackaton just concluded, involving more than 2.6 thousand programmers and coders from around the globe. – At ING we continually set ourselves new challenges and look for ways to improve our processes. Thanks to initiatives like this, we can experiment, create new solutions, share knowledge, and inspire – says Sławomir Soszyński, vice president of the board of ING Bank Śląski, responsible for Tech and IT security.
The Global ING Hackaton was organized under the idea of #ActAsOne, to collaboratively confront challenges, find better solutions, implement innovations quickly, and write better code. Teams from all around the globe participated, coding for 24 hours straight. The Polish representation consisted of 314 participants. The whole event was streamed between locations from different countries. The teams consisted of two to five individuals, each led by a captain. The teams worked on resolving tasks in defined areas, associated with migration to public cloud, transition to ICHP, improving security, automating processes as well as sustainable development goals.
More than 2.6 thousand programmers from our technology organization worldwide participated in the agenda and challenges we defined. Over 300 people were from Poland, making us a quite large group, and one of our teams made it to the finals. This confirms our potential and that we have excellent engineers. There were many creative ideas, including in the AI area. These ideas will be further refined and implemented when they are mature – says Sławomir Soszyński.
Artificial intelligence is currently one of the hottest topics in business. According to data cited in the Mastercard Signals January report “Generative AI: The transformation of banking”, 55% of CEOs of large global companies declare that they “assess or experiment” with generative artificial intelligence, and 37% are already using it. McKinsey & Company points out that banking is one of the sectors on which AI already has a major impact – in many different functional areas.
Artificial intelligence is a major trend and there is an ongoing discussion whether it will remain mainstream in the long term. In the financial sector, AI solutions can be utilized in various areas. The first is customer service, improving user experience, the communication front with the client. The second, in the background or the back-end, includes a whole host of systems that can be further automated and refined using predictive methods and various language models. The third element is cybersecurity, as hackers begin to make heavy use of AI. We need to be a step ahead of them – the expert adds.
Experts emphasize that generative artificial intelligence will significantly contribute to how banks will manage their front-office and back-office operations. Initially, its application is in software creation, customer service, and automation of repeatable tasks. The opportunities AI offers in this sector are shown by last year’s Accenture analysis (“3 Ways Generative AI Will Transform Banking”). Its authors note, for example, that Morgan Stanley has implemented a generative AI tool that provides financial advisers during conversations with clients better access to the bank’s “intellectual capital,” which includes about 100,000 reports and documents. Meanwhile, AI Copilot by GitHub can help a bank’s programmers write code up to 55% faster and independently create 46% of the required code. Accenture’s research also shows that even 61% of work time in 19 different industries can be transformed by large language models such as ChatGPT. In banking, this percentage increases to 73% – the highest value among all sectors covered by analysis.
In last year’s SAS analysis, one of the leaders in analytics and AI, predicts that over the next few years, the banking sector will be one of the biggest beneficiaries of artificial intelligence. Its application will provide banks with greater operational efficiency, allow them to reduce business risk, effectively counter fraud, and manage customer experience while shortening the whole process. The greatest benefits will come in modernising and developing analytical models, including estimating client ratings and decision making. SAS also notes that AI is currently revolutionizing the way banks detect and prevent financial fraud. Banks – using machine learning algorithms – can now quickly and accurately analyze large amounts of data to identify high-risk transactions and patterns that may indicate fraudulent activity.
The rapid development of AI and other technologies changes how banks operate. As they work on new products and solutions, they increasingly resemble software companies today.
