FinAi Podcast

In this podcast, Hawk AI founder and CEO Tobias Schweiger discusses the use of machine learning to eliminate false positives created by AML rules-based engines while stressing that new technologies should be seen as a supplement — not a replacement — for rules-based detection. 

This week, Bank Automation News delves into a House committee’s inquiry into a potential central bank digital currency (CBDC), and explored China’s role in prompting the U.S. to explore a CBDC, as well as the U.S. hesitancy to adopt digital currency.

The BAN team also explored how neobanks are causing more banks to abandon a major financial institution money maker — overdraft fees.

Find a discussion of these topics and more in today’s episode of the Weekly Wrap with Editor Myra Thomas and Associate Editors Jaspreet Kalra and Loraine Lawson for the week ended June 18, 2021.

Removing bias from artificial intelligence (AI) models may seem as simple as removing demographic information from the data, but it may be more valuable instead to inform the model about the demographics, then weight them to offset bias. 

That’s one possibility studies have supported, Stephen Thomas tells Bank Automation News in this episode of “The Buzz.” Thomas is the head of the Analytics and Artificial Intelligence (AI) Ecosystem at the Smith School of Business at Queen’s University in Canada.  

For instance, “If we tell the [AI] model what the gender is, it can account for that difference and bias,” Thomas explains. “It's helpful for the model to be less biased — knowing what the gender is — because otherwise, due to historical, societal prejudices, an average woman might look worse than an average male for no reason other than that she's a woman.”    

In today’s podcast, learn how ideas of fairness play into AI models and why what seems fair may be unfair to certain populations. Thomas also shares some best practices for creating ethical AI platforms. 

In this week’s podcast, Bank Automation News tackles the question of what banks can expect from regulatory agencies when it comes to deploying artificial intelligence (AI) in financial services. AI may offer a competitive advantage for U.S. companies, Sultan Meghji, the FDIC’s new chief innovation officer, told BAN. And while he said AI should be tested for bias, he stated that “the vast majority of artificial intelligence in the banking system has nothing to do with making credit decisions.” 

The BAN team also discusses here how banks are leveraging AI for credit scoring, particularly for those without credit, and the ethical issues that crop up with AI-driven decisioning.  

Find a discussion of these topics and more in today’s episode of the Weekly Wrap with Publisher JJ Hornblass, Editor Myra Thomas, Associate Editors Jaspreet Kalra and Loraine Lawson for the week ended June 4, 2021. 

Financial institutions should expect data privacy laws like the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) to spread to other states and countries, creating pressure on multinational banks.  

In this episode of “The Buzz,” Bank Automation News learns that even banks with customer service based in other countries will be challenged to comply with new regulations, according to Evgeny Likhoded, founder and chief executive for at compliance automation company ClauseMatch.  

“A bank might have clients in the U.S., but customer service in a different country, and offices in 60 other countries,” Likhoded says. “Then, separating that client data and making sure that no one can access it where they are not supposed to, technically, is going to be a challenge.” 

ClauseMatch’s client list includes the fintech Revolut and Barclays Bank, which has 90,000 staff members using the tool to automate compliance documents and policies.   

Listen as Likhoded also discusses in this podcast the looming compliance issues presented by environmental, social and corporate governance (ESC) criteria, and artificial intelligence. 

This week, Bank Automation News drilled down on key performance indicators (KPIs) for bots, and process discovery, or the pre-automation analysis of processes.  

While it’s common practice to use purely operational KPIs, such as measuring bots deployed, experts say a better practice is to align bot KPIs with business goals. One key step to determining bot success is to engage in process discovery before deploying bots.  

Citi Ventures, Citibank’s venture investment arm and incubator, is setting its sights on process discovery investments in the coming year, Managing Director Matt Carbonara told BAN this week. In this podcast the BAN team discusses process discovery and how it fits into the broader practice of process mining.  

Find a discussion of these topics and more in today’s episode of the Weekly Wrap with Publisher JJ Hornblass, Editor Myra Thomas and Associate Editor Loraine Lawson for the week ended May 21, 2021. 

In this week’s episode of “The Buzz,” Bank Automation News explores the threat of randsomware attacks on financial institutions. Banks are facing the growing cybersecurity threat that shut down the Colonial Pipeline last week and the BAN team discusses how banks can avoid falling victim to similar attacks by ransomware hackers.

In other news, new use cases for robot process automation (RPA) are cropping up that involve combining RPA with advanced technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning. Banks are leveraging these tools to automate loan collections and fraud detection.

Find a discussion of these topics and more in today’s episode of the Weekly Wrap with Publisher JJ Hornblass and Associate Editors Jaspreet Kalra and Loraine Lawson for the week ended May 14, 2021.