AI in Financial Services Podcast

This month's theme is the culture of innovation within banks. When we did our AI in banking Vendor Scorecard and Capability Map report and we asked bankers what the biggest barrier to AI adoption in banking was, the number one response was the lack of a culture of innovation within banks. And the question is: how do we change that? How do we cultivate that culture? In this episode, we interview Jo...

This is the final episode of our September series on Strategic Recommendations for Bankers. My job this week is to connect the dots between some of the insights we got from our interviewees this month. This includes one common thread across interviews: banks have an underlying fear of the FinTechs popping up everywhere and eating market share.

This week, we speak with With Sebastien de Brouwer, Chief Policy Officer at the European Banking Federation, about where banking leaders should be focused when it comes to AI in banking. Sebastien discusses which areas of banking—customer experience, legal risk, positioning—banks might latch onto when allocating budget for AI.  

Our guest this week is Nishant Chandra, PhD and Senior Director of Data Products at Visa. Nishant speaks with us about how banks can pivot to play to their strengths in a future where the technology landscape is shifting under their feet. He uses some good examples from Apple and GE that can help banking leaders think through how their culture can change to make AI a positive and not a negative.

This week, we spoke to another of our research advisors: Lee Smallwood, COO of Markets and Securities for Citi North America. Lee speaks with us about the dynamics of AI talent: finding the right talent and growing the right talent. How can a bank attract the right young people, train the right people within their organization, and martial them to success with AI in the future? How does a bank com...

This month we focus on strategic recommendations for AI in banking. We're bringing back our research advisors for our AI in Banking Vendor Scorecard and Capability Map report , and this week, we speak with Ian Wilson, former Head of AI at HSBC. Wilson shares some of his thoughts as to what bankers should be thinking about when it comes to AI. Specifically: 1. Why is all the investment and attentio...

It's the final episode of our month-long series on AI for the customer experience in banking. This week, Emerj CEO Daniel Faggella breaks down the insights from this month's interviews and colors them with data from our AI in Banking Vendor Scorecard and Capability Map report. In this episode, Daniel draws a picture about what the data says about AI for customer-facing applications in banking and...

This week we're joined by Sasha Caskey, the CTO of Kasisto. Kasisto is the highest-rated conversational interface vendor in our AI in Banking Vendor Scorecard and Capability Map report. Caskey discusses the future of where conversational interfaces fit into banking, including the automation of repetitive tasks. She also talks about the challenges of personal assistance, and how the real revolution...

This week, we speak with Sindhu Joseph, CEO at CogniCor. She drops a quote in this interview that I really love and that I think hits on this month's theme well: "People don't need banks. They need banking." Joseph discusses how banks will have to transform to meet consumer expectations that are set by big tech. She talks about how one could hypothetically build a bank for 10% of the cost that ban...

The theme for the entire month is AI for the customer experience in banking. In this episode, we speak with Yinglian Xie, CEO at Datavisor. Xie sheds light on how users will expect to have "zero-step" authentication, the "friction-free" future of banking. Xie paints a picture about how the experience consumers have with big tech (such as a Facebook app) can be transferred into banking. She gives a...

We learned a lot about AI in risk-related banking functions, such as fraud, cybersecurity, compliance, and lending, in our AI in Banking Vendor Scorecard and Capability Map report. In this month's analyst deep dive, Emerj CEO Daniel Faggella discusses some of the insights garnered from the data in our report about why vendors selling products for risk-related functions have raised so much money an...

This week, we speak with Owen Hall, CEO at Heliocor, about the proliferation of what Hall calls "breadcrumbs," digital touchpoints that a user has with a bank. He talks about how these touchpoints are creating new opportunities for banks and, also, new risks in terms of fraud and cybersecurity. Hall also discusses how banks can leverage their brand, in contrast to other guests we've had on the pod...

This week on the AI in Banking podcast we interview Ohad Samet, CEO of TrueAccord, about the applications of artificial intelligence for debt collection. We discuss personalized messaging, collection forecasting, and the debt collection AI lessons that might be applied to other finance use-cases. This is the third episode in our month-long focus on risk-related AI functions in banking.   Subscribe...

This week, we speak with Adam Hunt, CTO of RiskIQ, about how cybersecurity is shifting in the world of banking and financial services and why AI will be necessary to handle those changes. Fraud and cybersecurity startups selling to banks have raised more than vendors for any other business function, and we talk about why AI is such a good fit for cybersecurity in banking. Hunt also discusses how b...

This week, we speak with Gunnar Carlsson, co-founder of Ayasdi, one of the better-known anti-money laundering AI vendors and one of the highest ranking in our AI in Banking Vendor Landscape report. Carlsson pioneered his own branch of mathematics that eventually became the backbone of Ayasdi's AI software. We speak to Carlsson about methods of calibrating and understanding risk at banks, new sourc...

The Emerj team discusses insights from our AI in Banking Vendor Scorecard and Capability Map report. Which banking functions are banks eager to automate with AI? Which functions are sucking up all of the venture capital funding? Which AI capabilities are all hype? Emerj CEO Daniel Faggella and lead analyst Raghav Bharadwaj break down what our data tells us about the future of artificial intelligen...

According to Sergey Gribov, Partner at Flint Capital, "banks are the ultimate commodity." Fintech startups can offer banking services with leaner teams and better customer experiences using artificial intelligence. But banks need to differentiate themselves somehow from not just fintech companies, but other banks, especially as they decide which banking functions they want to focus on in the comin...

Banks have several challenges to AI adoption. One of them is their legacy IT and data infrastructures which aren't built or organized for machine learning. Nishant Chandra, PhD, Senior Director of Data Products at Visa, outlines how banks can transition their legacy systems to systems ready for AI. Chandra discusses the importance of leadership teams in cultivating a company culture necessary for...

Customer experience is what wins, according to Lee Smallwood, COO Markets and Securities Services at Citi. In this episode of the AI in Banking Podcast, we speak with Smallwood about how fintech companies are already using AI to improve the customer experience and how banks will likely have trouble competing with them on that front.  Smallwood, however, also talks about how banks can leverage thei...

We interview the former Head of Artificial Intelligence at HSBC about how banks should go about developing not one AI strategy for their business, but multiple AI strategies for each business function, each department at a company. He also discusses the importance of the Chief AI Officer in steering the company toward success with AI. How are banks experimenting (or not) with AI now, and what do t...