AI in Financial Services Podcast

We are changing the name of our podcast to AI in Financial Services. In this episode, Dan explains why and discusses how the show will address the coronavirus pandemic and how it affects innovation in financial services. 

While a lot of people are excited about customer-facing applications in financial services, right now, the ROI of AI comes down to fraud detection and compliance use-cases. That's what this episode is about. We interview Hani Hagras, Chief Science Officer of Temenos. Hani speaks with us about the present and future of AI for compliance, including where banks can reduce risk and how AI could help....

When it comes to adopting AI applications, the team lessons are almost always better understood by the vendors than by the banks. This week, we speak with Sasha Caskey, CTO of Kasisto. He speaks with us about what he's learned from working with teams that get it right and teams that don't. He also provides a particularly interesting insight about the importance of having "nurturing" data scientist...

Our guest this week, Madhu, works at one of the top 10 Australian banks. He has a lot of experience applying AI in customer service. Madhu speaks about how to grow an AI team, when to hire data scientists, when to hire someone to lead those data scientists, and what kinds of talent needs to be there to help guide data scientists.  If you're interested in learning more about our AI Opportunity Land...

Our focus this month on  AI in Banking  is on building a successful data science team. This week, we speak with Jan Veldsink, who heads up AI for compliance at Rabobank.   He discusses how to educate cross-functional AI teams, answering questions about how to get subject-matter experts and data scientists on the same page and how to measure the success of AI teams.   If you're interested in gettin...

Almost any time we engage with financial institutions, chatbots are at least part of the conversation. There are not many credible chatbot companies that are focused explicitly in banking, but Kasisto is one of them. Our guest this week, Sasha Caskey, is CTO of Kasisto. Sasha talks about starting small with chatbots and reasonable expectations for them in banking. If you're interested in mapping t...

Our guest this week, Paul Barba, heads up AI efforts at Lexalytics. I visited their headquarters as part of our AI in Montreal piece we released about 2 years back. Paul speaks with us about how NLP can layer value on top of conversational interfaces, as well as the limits of chatbots and NLP in finance. For more on what NLP can and can't do in business, be sure to download our 9-page guide, Unloc...

This week, we interview Madhu, who works on conversational interfaces at one of the four largest Australian banks. He speaks today about the phases of deployment for bringing a chatbot to life in financial services. It involves more phases than people might presume, but they are important to understand. If you have an interest in the broader AI opportunity landscape in banking, you can learn more...

This month, we start a brand new theme: chatbots in banking. Nothing is more hyped in banking than chatbots, so we want to shed some light on what's actually happening with chatbots in the banking industry and what really isn't.  Our guest this week is Scott Nowson, AI Lead at PwC, Middle East. Scott talks about the three phases of building a chatbot from scratch. Scott was also one of the first t...

This week, we interview Jan Veldsink, head of AI for compliance at Rabobank. He's been using AI and advanced statistics to detect fraud at Rabobank for nearly ten years. He shares with us some practical near-term applications of NLP in compliance, as well as his ideas on where NLP can add more value to banking in the future. This is our last episode in January's series on NLP in banking. If you wa...

This week, we speak with a fan favorite guest from our AI in Industry Podcast: Dr. Charles Martin of Calculation Consulting. Charles talks about the challenges of applying natural language processing to wealth management, including what's working and what's not with AI in wealth management. He has a lot of experience applying AI in the enterprise, and I think you'll enjoy this particular episode q...

We speak this week with Greg Council, VP of Marketing and Product Management at Parascript, an AI-enabled search and discovery vendor selling into the financial services sector. In this episode, Greg discusses what NLP can and can't do in the banking industry. If you're interested in broad natural language processing use-cases and you haven't already downloaded our NLP use-case guide, you can do s...

It's the first episode of the new decade, and we're kicking off with our theme for the entire month of January: natural language processing (NLP) applications in banking. Our first guest is Lee Smallwood, COO Markets and Securities at Citi. He was a trusted advisor for our most robust AI in banking research report. This week, Lee talks about front- and back-end NLP applications in banking, and I t...

This is an excellent episode. We speak with Ritchie Ng, Chief AI Officer at Ensemble Capital. Ritchie goes into a topic we really haven't covered much in this series and which hasn't been a big focus of the podcast: hiring data scientists. That's hard when Google and Facebook are grabbing the top talent. Ritchie goes into how this should be done. If you're getting started with AI at your business,...

This week, we speak with Marek Bardonski, CEO of AI Rev. He was previously with Sigmoidal, where his focus was on AI for wealth management. When it comes to what banks can do that startups can't, it's make the most of the money they have on hand, and the future of wealth management and trading is potentially an area of edge for smart financial services firms and banks around the world. In this epi...

This week, we speak with Executive Director of AlgoDynamix, Jeremy Sosabowski, about how banks can leverage partnerships and vendors as opposed to building in-house AI talent. He also speaks to us about how banks can deal with some of their inherent weaknesses when facing up against the startup ecosystem. if you're interested in natural language processing applications in banking, be sure to downl...

In this episode of AI in Banking, Eigen Tech CEO Lewis Liu shares his thoughts on how banks can leverage their data, expertise, and deployable capital to compete and keep up with AI startups - and to stay relevant in the years ahead.  Lewis's original interview was part of our AI in Banking Landscape report. If you haven't yet downloaded your copy of the executive brief of this report, download it...

This month, we're focused on how banks can survive and thrive in an era of Ai disruption. Our first guest is Rob Delaney with Carrick Capital. Rob speaks with us about where banks can focus their own internal AI efforts if they want to compete with fintechs, whether they focus on customer-facing applications or internal applications. He also discusses what the future ecosystem looks like in terms...

This is our final episode in our month-long series on AI for search and discovery in banking, and this week we speak with Dan Courtright, Senior Director of Management at Iron Mountain. If you've ever taken out a loan from the bank, you know that there is a lot of paperwork involved. AI-enabled search and discovery applications could help streamline loan processing and loan origination, as well as...

In this episode, we continue our theme on AI-enabled search and discovery in banking by interviewing Sheetal Rishi, Global Cognitive and Data Leader at IBM. She previously spent time McKinsey and Citi.  Sheetal speaks to us about which functional departments she believes there exists the most need for search and discovery applications in banking, and she discusses how the areas in which banks spen...

This week, we speak with Luca Scagliarini with Expert System about a number of low-hanging fruit NLP applications within banking, including those for wealth management. He discusses where the advantage lies in terms of using NLP to decide on making investment decisions for clients. There's a lot of action in this space, and Luca does a great job of summarizing it. He also discusses where chatbots...

This week kicks off our first episode in our month-long series on AI for search and discovery in banking. How can AI help us find data, find files, find documents within a bank's intranet? Whether we're looking for customer information, legal issues, or the right document, how can AI help? This week, we speak with Simone Bohnenberger-Rich of Eigen Tech about how banks can use AI to find documents...

This is our final episode in our series on building a culture of innovation in banks, our analyst episode in which Emerj CEO Daniel Faggella summarizes and adds insight to the interviews from this past month. In this episode, Daniel talks about the individual greatest factor in determining whether a bank has a culture of innovation or not: how well the C-suite can articulate an AI transformation v...

This week, we speak with Mark Gazit, CEO of Thetaray, an AI vendor that focuses on financial fraud and anti-money laundering. Mark speaks with us from a vendor perspective about what kind of culture a bank has when it adopts AI the right way and what kind of culture it has when it adopts AI the wrong way. Mark also doubles down on the idea that the culture of innovation needs to be top-down, comin...

When banks, financial services companies, and even AI vendors servicing the banking landscape look to innovate in how they improve their customer experience, it's almost never because they want to service their most valuable customers today. It's almost always driven by what they know the next generation is going to expect. Whenever we do work for our clients, Millenials are almost always on the t...