110 FEATURE By enhancing operational efficiency, these AI tools are also transforming how financial services professionals engage with their clients. “Generative AI can help employees provide more relevant and customised product offers, decreasing the amount of time they spend creating content or drafting emails and freeing them up to focus on other customer-related activities,” explains Hamblin. “In essence, it makes their daily lives more productive, reducing wasted cycles and giving more time back to customers.” Working in tandem Microsoft partners play a key role in identifying potential AI use cases for improving the customer experience. “Partners are the lifeblood of Microsoft,” says Hamblin. “They do a good job of enhancing and extending our first-party capabilities. For example, VeriPark has a broad set of banking-specific capabilities built on top of the Microsoft stack, using Azure and Dynamics 365, and they integrate with Microsoft 365. VeriPark’s solutions enhance loan origination, KYC and teller management. And Zafin is a leading provider of product and pricing lifecycle management solutions that help banks to manage the products and services they offer to customers.” Zafin is leveraging Microsoft technologies as the basis for its solutions, which provide access to financial data and modernise old core banking systems. Meanwhile, Backbase’s seamless integration to Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Teams is helping banking operations, especially tasks associated with mobile and online banking. “With Backbase, financial services providers can connect mobile and online banking to a holistic view of customer activity, allowing them to communicate with customers across various channels,” says Hamblin. “Backbase provides banks with advanced business intelligence capabilities to help with renewals and best-offer actions. Meanwhile, Personetics uses predictive analytics and generative AI to analyse financial data in real-time to anticipate customer needs and ASC Technologies integrates with Teams to help financial services employees comply with regulations and enhance productivity.” Hamblin predicts that AI-powered solutions will likely automate manual tasks, like checking for regulatory compliance and paper-based processing, in the next few years. But he believes employees should embrace this change. “There’s a sense of concern around AI in that it’s replacing human jobs, but AI should be seen as a combination success story,” he says. “It automates some human-led tasks that are routine, laborious or time-intensive – and frankly, these areas will be improved by automation. However, there are many cases where there is a hand-off or an intersection between generative AI and those human interactions.” For example, AI automation could cut digital debt, which Microsoft defines as the burden placed on information workers by “the inflow of data, emails, meetings and notifications” in the 2023 Work Trend Index Annual Report. Nearly two in three people (64 per cent) say they struggle with having the time and energy to do their job and almost two in three leaders (60 per cent) feel the effects, saying they lack innovation or breakthrough ideas from their teams, according to the report. This is particularly for true for the financial services industry. “The sheer amount of data and apps banks use is basically causing information overload for a lot of employees,” explains Hamblin. Hamblin (centre) joined ASC’s Katrin Henkel and Michael Broderick at Money20/20 USA to present a joint session on their collaboration to develop AI-powered solutions for banking compliance
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