Emergent tech, overlapping risks

Ranging from client service to software bot bankers, innovative emergent technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), blockchain, and robotics are revolutionizing the financial services space. This article will help you in obtaining deeper insight on the proliferation and acceptance trends of such tech.

Technological disruption; obtaining a foothold within the financial services space

Artificial intelligence (AI), robotics, and DLT are predicted to incite a paradigm shift within the financial services space, taking it into a new era. The question is to what extent are these innovative emergent technologies experiencing proliferation and deployment across the industry? In the pursuit of answering this question, industry giant Deloitte funded a survey of executives belonging to the capital markets, banking, wealth management, and insurance spaces of the financial services domain.

The outcome: Respondents highlighted that they were thrilled with regards to robotics, Artificial Intelligence, and DLT, but several had concerns over the risks that are endemic to innovative emergent tech.

In summary, enterprises are stuck between a steep learning curve, and the requirement to maintain the pace with game-changing competition in the market, even as several respondents confessed a requirement for extra understanding of these innovative technologies.

Many top-tier officials of enterprises are concerned that there’s a gap prevalent between perceptions regarding the capacities of these emergent technologies and the actuality of what they can achieve.

The question then becomes one of whether your business is prepped to adopt these emergent, innovative technologies.

Artificial Intelligence

Financial enterprises are harnessing Artificial Intelligences in a broad array of scenarios. In conjunction with the client service chatbots that are commonplace in industry, they’re also undertaking deployment of AI in loan automation and insurance underwriting. Combined with the trio of disruptive digital tech categories that are the concentration of Deloitte’s survey, top-tier executives from the financial services domain demonstrated the most familiarity when it comes to Artificial Intelligence.

Breaking down the numbers

• 41% of survey participants were “extremely” or “really” informed with regards to AI.
• 53% of those acquainted with AI stated that their enterprises are producing or have already put out commercial deployments or pilots of AI applications.

Risk quotient

AI is an emergent technology that comes bundled with an inherent risk portfolio. Badly designed decision-making frameworks can produce errors and increase prospective regulatory issues. The responders to the survey were demonstrating caution with regards to the expenditure connected to the technology and the possibility of it misfiring. And a few reported that they’re waiting to pull the trigger on AI until its future solidifies.

• 47% of financial services executive personnel stated it will be a matter of criticality to deploy AI within the next half-a-decade.

Robotics

Robotics is an umbrella term that covers a wide array of technologies and, based off of the survey, it’s serving as a revelation within the financial services industry. Robots vary in what form they come in, ranging from physical devices like client service robots in retail scenarios to software bots that take up the controls of business applications. Software bots are an aspect of the expanding domain of RPA (Robotic Process Automation)

 Risk quotient

Implementation of robotics consists of an array of divergent risks, which can include badly designed automation that can improve errors during the process. Additionally, substituting human staff members can put a hamper on employee morale. Lower the morale, the more the employees are likely to relinquish duties to an automated process, which is usually, more efficient than them. It can also give rise to divides in roles and culpability as enterprise transition to automated frameworks.

Survey respondents from enterprises that are waiting to pull the trigger on robotics deployment made citations to an array of barriers, which included expenses and the non-establishment of robust cases for how the technology can prove to be beneficial.

• 45% the executives surveyed specified that their enterprises are considering new applications for robotics

Blockchain

Blockchain (which operates on Distributed Ledger Technology, or DLT) is revolutionizing the emergent tech that financial enterprises opine could considerably influence the paradigm in which business is currently being done in. Several financial enterprises are harnessing the power and capabilities of DLT to develop an array of unique platforms – like payments and trade finance, and are starting to initiate engagement with cryptocurrencies that have experienced penetration and adoption.

• 35% of survey respondents stated they were “very” or “really” educated about the blockchain.
• 40% signified that blockchain implementations at their particular enterprises will be really critical or vital in half-a-decade
• 13% specified that the blockchain implementation will be really critical or vital over the course of the next one year.
• 23% of survey respondents acquainted with the blockchain stated that their enterprises have initiated or are developing pilot programs harnessing blockchain-based apps.

Risk quotient

There are a broad array of risks to ponder about when assessing blockchain for deployment. The following are two of the most typical risks connected to distributed ledger technology:

• Value transfer risks: The peer-to-peer framework introduces participants to risks that would, in other instances, be handled by a centralized intermediary.
• Smart contract risks: Smart contracts can possibly encode advanced business, financial, and legal arrangements on the distributed ledger. Alignment of these with the several permutations, exceptions, and constraints that prevail in practical terms is a huge challenge.
• 43% of survey respondents specified that their businesses are working on or are presently initiating/have initiated blockchain pilot programs or commercial applications.

Leveraging innovative emergent technologies

Based on the results of the survey, financial services enterprises have jumped on disruptive emergent technologies, and several firms are moving with a pressing sense of urgency and eagerness. One of the survey respondent’s detailed it as the imperative to “move quicker than the human”

However, unknowns are the rules within nascent and emergent technologies. Firms encounter a broad array of risks in the determination of which technology to obtain and how to deploy it. Within those risks, executives were eager to list hurdles and complications in integrations, resource limitations, and the influence of existing processes when compelled to consider the hurdles that are inherent to adoption in its current state.

Conclusion

This part went into detail on some of the statistics and numbers regarding emergent technologies that are driving the financial and banking industries in new, and innovative ways, paving the way for a paradigm shift. The third part of this blog series will look at innovative use cases of these emergent technologies within the banking and financial industries, and will contain a recap/summarization section on the prior two parts of the blog.