ORLANDO, Fla. — Long seen as a laggard in digital adoption, the heavily regulated financial services sector has proven that an established cloud strategy can propel a company’s artificial intelligence initiatives forward.
The effort is fueled by the desire to reap the promised advantages of AI tools, including agents, throughout operations. More than half of banking IT executives expect AI agents to be fully embedded in risk, compliance and audit functions, as well as fraud detection and transaction monitoring, according to Accenture data. A separate McKinsey report expects companies to trim their costs by up to 20% as they deploy the technology.
The successful rollout of AI agents in the context of financial services requires collaboration with business clients, according to Ken Tingle, first vice president and business intelligence manager at Hyannis, Massachusetts-based Cape & Coast Bank.
“There’s a strategic component, a collaboration component,” Tingle said last week during the Creatio No-Code Days Florida conference. “You have to bring in not only technology but your sales leaders in order to deploy a solution that’s going to benefit the organization.”
Collaboration is particularly important for data. Leaders should enlist the entire organization to support governance and data quality initiatives, Tingle said, as agents can’t carry out successful actions without the right data.
AI use cases in the financial services sector are focused closely on driving growth. The bank turned to Creatio’s platform to deploy a referral agent, tracking the performance of AI-recommended leads alongside employee-driven referrals.
“You want to start small and focused,” Tingle said. “Start targeted with a very small audience, and then deploy slowly to the rest of your organization.”
Adoption and data in focus
Along with audience, one tech executive recommended starting with a targeted, straightforward use case to encourage AI adoption.
“Ground zero is: have people use AI assistant-type use cases,” Drew McMonigle, chief technology officer at Warsaw, Indiana-based Lake City Bank, said during the conference. “You cannot fully automate something until you get people using the assisting capability.”
Once adoption begins to gain traction, communicate those successful, approved use cases throughout the organization to create groundswell organic adoption while supporting AI governance. “It also makes for very organic use case generation,” McMonigle said.
The financial services industry shares a common challenge other industries are facing with AI: how critical data is to successful deployments.
“If we don’t have clean data, any integration you make from any other system is not going to be satisfactory,” said Meeta Autrey, vice president and IT manager at Sun Valley, California-based Mission Valley Bank.
Cape & Coast Bank introduced an incentives program to reward employees for flagging and remediating errors in customer data.
“It’s a big process,” Tingle said. “You have to reward them for it.”
