Busting Four Myths About GenAI in the Banking Industry
Corey Gross | VP, Product Management
Imagine you walk into your local bank or credit union branch, and instead of a teller, you're greeted by a holographic AI assistant. Sounds like science fiction, right? Well, it's not — but it's also not the reality of AI in banking today. The truth lies somewhere between the mundane and the mind-blowing, and it's time we separated fact from fiction.
Here are
* MYTH: GenAI replaces human insight.
Truth: GenAI supports better, data-driven human decision-making.
The same way that revolutionary knowledge-sharing technologies like Google, Sharepoint and Zoom help colleagues access information and collaborate more efficiently, GenAI tools can accelerate analysis by bringing together separate stores of data.
While the aforementioned tools are digital versions of libraries and conference rooms, facilitating the rapid sharing of information, GenAI can help develop new content by combining large language models (LLMs), deep industry knowledge and human cognizance. The addition of human decision-making and oversight are critical to building GenAI solutions for banking. So, far from replacing human insight, GenAI tools are building upon it.
* MYTH: GenAI replaces the knowledge of bankers.
Truth: GenAI allows bankers to tap into collective intelligence, best practices, and successful strategies to provide a more personalized customer experience.
Far from making human expertise obsolete, GenAI creates — and builds on — shared repositories of knowledge. By rapidly processing vast amounts of financial data, regulations, and market trends, AI equips bankers with instant access to relevant information. This allows them to focus on applying this knowledge to each unique customer situation rather than spending time on research and data analysis.
GenAI's capabilities extend to pattern recognition in customer behavior, market trends, and risk factors. It can create and update shared repositories of best practices, run multiple "what-if" scenarios for comprehensive financial planning, and provide personalized customer insights. These tools enable bankers to offer more informed, tailored advice and make better decisions for clients.
While AI handles data processing and pattern recognition, bankers provide the crucial elements of emotional intelligence, ethical judgment, and personalized communication that are essential in building trust.
* MYTH: GenAI will take people’s jobs.
Truth: GenAI removes the mundane and makes room for higher-value work, like building better customer experiences and securing lifetime banking relationships.
Robots are not plotting to take over the world. Neither are AI assistants coming for your job. What they might do, though, is take away some of your more tedious tasks, thereby taking both your time and your productivity to a higher level.
If you can use an AI assistant to format and analyze spreadsheet data in 20 minutes instead of two hours, not only do you get 83% of your time back for more meaningful work, but you also get a boost from GenAI’s superhuman computing power, which might surface some meaningful insights that human analysts could have missed.
* MYTH: GenAI poses an existential threat to the banking industry.
Truth: GenAI can help strengthen lifetime relationships with customers or members.
Companies understand that data can help drive more personalized customer experiences. That’s why we’ve been swiping our loyalty cards at the supermarket for the last several decades. As service providers, the more information we have on customer preferences, the better we can tailor our solutions to their wants and needs and the more successful we’ll be at keeping that customer long term. And, since it costs much less to keep a customer you already have than to acquire a new one, profitability rises, too.
The common thread among all four truths is that GenAI integration into our processes isn’t an either/or scenario; the conversation isn’t “humans versus machines.” As long as banks and credit unions approach GenAI with the goal of enhancing and complementing original, human-generated work, based on human-generated prompts and directions, the AI reality will be far better than the science fiction horror plots we may have feared.
Adam Blue, Executive Vice President and CTO of Q2, puts it this way: “For me, GenAI is more like equipping security personnel with smart glasses, which provide them with critical information and enhanced vision, rather than autonomous drones, which remove human judgment.” The truth is all in the lens you’re looking through.
As your organization considers how best to integrate Generative AI tools into your business, we’re here to support you along the way. Find more resources and frameworks for each stage of your GenAI journey in our comprehensive report, “The Future of Generative AI in Service of the Banking Industry.”