DECEMBER 20199service functions end to end. Given an AI system evolves and only gets smarter the more it interacts with its con-stituents, the only direction this trend seems to be going in seems up-wards.Online BankingGone are the days when people would need to a visit a branch to withdraw money, transfer funds from one place to another. Internet & Mobile banking has virtually become a bank branch where almost any task can be performed & things are getting intelligent by the day.Fraud DetectionThe investigation and identification of frauds has al-ways been a mammoth challenge for Financial In-stitutions. However, new age technology tools have moved the exercise from post event to a pre-event in-vestigation where these tools help to ascertain the probability of someone defaulting before even the fraud be-ing committed. What's better ­ penalise or prevent ­ the answer is clearly in favour of prevent. Given all this can be done at speed humans cannot match, institutions with this capability have got unmatched leverage to beat competition & grow faster than everybody. Credit ScoringCredit Scoring has been the bedrock of any lending decision. The credit scorecard has evolved over the years but restrict-ed or ready access finance for huge populations across the globe, particularly in emerging & under developed econo-mies, as credit scores were primarily developed based on banking behaviour. Given these economies had cash as pri-mary transaction medium, these populations had unreliable credit history & hence fewer opportunities for future credit. Also, the data has been built over decades hence for people with recent access to banking are likely to take at least a few years before they develop enough credit history for a score. However, technology combined with behavioural science, advanced statistical tools has again massively disrupted the way credit underwriting is done. Today, companies like Lind-sell work on alternative data sets like social media profiling, analysing mobile phone usage patterns & other personal at-tributes to arrive at a propensity to default and their solu-tions have helped institutions lend to people who hitherto did not have access to finance within acceptable bands of default probability. Other newer areas where we have seen a paradigm change due to FINTECH are Lending (Borrowing), Global money transfers, Payments, and Banking. Lending (Borrowing)Peer-2-Peer platforms, Digital lending, harnessing the power of big data to take underwriting decisions are few of success stories of adopting the power of technology in the world of finance. Lending club, a 10-year-old FIN-TECH has lent over $38 billion through its platform which easily rivals many established banks in terms of growth & annual disbursals. These Fin-tech companies have reduced the time to close a commercial transaction with the customer from days to hours and in some cases even minutes. This is has resulted in huge savings in terms of reduced manpower re-quirements, high productivity, better compliance & overall an enriching experience for the customer. Most of these new age companies have completely taken the process digital with minimal human interaction, at least at the customer end thus eliminating elements of judge-ment, negligence, and others replacing them with robust technological algorithms by providing a seamless experi-ence & little chances of error.Technology based WorldIt may seem all is positive with technology replacing hu-mans. At some levels, the introduction of technology at these vital touchpoints in the business chain has also creat-ed friction primarily due to its nascent stage in terms of ad-vancement of such applications in business. As such, these frictions are opportunities for future developments that will deal with more complexity & use advancements such as Ma-chine learning, neural networks to create human like expe-riences at the psychological level. This would then create an experience as real as a human-to-human interaction with-out the customer ever knowing that the one serving him is a machine. It has also been believed by many that technolo-gy will progress to a point where it becomes more ef-ficient than the people who made them. And the real problem with that would be that a very compelling case would be made for a world based on machines. They're smarter, faster, less prone to mistakes and much more economically viable.Do we really need such a world is not the real question! It's inevitable. The real question is `Are we ready for such a world'. A key area which has seen massive disruption in the way customers are served, new as well as existing, is customer service
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