Who needs banks anymore?
Nowhere are these new technological tools needed more than in financial services. The industry is facing a plethora of new and increasingly complex challenges – painful reminders of the 2008 crisis. Customers are demanding increasingly complex services, while remaining worried about who they can trust. At the same time, compliance with a whole new raft of regulations is costing financial institutions a lot of time and money.
“People can bank without a bank now”, as Sebastian Krause, General Manager of IBM Cloud in Europe, put it. “There is competitive pressure – including from other industries – so banks are becoming less conservative in their approach to new technologies. The market will be disrupted even more in the future, so to stay in business they must open up to a changed world. To take the whole organisation on that journey is a big shift and it needs not only the right strategy, but also a lot of leadership.”
Take financial transactions: they are a vital and ever-growing part of modern society, but they are still, for the most part, conducted through woefully out-of-date methods. As ever more parties and ever-greater regulation are added, the level of complexity increases even further. Fortunately, there is an alternative.
Decentralised ledger technology (blockchain to you and me) has the potential to completely change the financial services industry, through greater efficiency, transparency and cost-effectiveness. For example, JP Morgan is working with one of the biggest names in blockchain – New York-based Digital Asset Holdings – to settle transactions faster and at significantly less expense to both the company and its consumers. The partnership has also resulted in a considerable reduction in the number of associated risks, including fraud and the liability of cross-border payments.
Crédit Mutuel Arkéa, meanwhile, began using cloud platform Bluemix to improve and manage customer identification in June 2016. By creating a single (but multinational) Know-Your-Client platform, the company no longer needlessly duplicates information or data requests. The result is a dramatic improvement to the user experience for both consumers and advisors.
More and more institutions are embracing this exciting new financial technology, whether through their adoption of blockchain, alternative payment systems or optimal customer data management. Customer expectations are growing, but through such fast-paced fintech development, they can be met.
Save a life
The benefits of advancing technology are not limited to improving efficiency and security. Just as AI can absorb, comprehend and retain everything there is to know about Roger Federer’s backhand, it can do the same with corporate data.
AI start-up DeepMind is taking bold steps in this area. Through its machine learning technology, medical data can be analysed far more quickly and accurately than ever before, improving the diagnosis process and treatment of a whole range of illnesses and afflictions.
As well as capturing unique information about individual patients’ health histories, cognitive computing provides vital access to previously concealed health data, while allowing it to be assimilated in one place. IBM Watson Health, for example, can digest up to 40 million documents in just 15 seconds; that’s a pretty impressive tool to have in the fight against cancer or dementia, say. Particularly when one considers that, by 2020, the volume of global medical records is expected to double every 73 days – a rate far beyond anything any conventional system is capable of coping with.
IBM Watson Health focuses on offering flexible, customisable services that cater to every patient’s individual needs. Through technological personalisation, organisations are able target specific patient groups and reduce staff workloads, creating a more streamlined and transparent process. Since adopting IBM Watson Health, Bon Secours Virginia Medical Group – a hospital-owned multi-speciality practice – has been able to create a viable platform between the traditional models of value-based care and fee-for-service across its 100 locations. The successful implementation of IBM’s technology dramatically increased both quality of patient care and revenue.
As you can imagine, healthcare executives quite like the idea of being able to both improve patient solutions and record management, and lower costs. The combination of big data analytics and scalable solutions can transform daily processes for a whole host of industry professionals, from researchers, physicians, care managers and nutritionists, to CIOs, hospital administrators and public health officials.
But the implications of this powerful new technology go far beyond the core industry of making people better. By collating data from hundreds of different sources into one space, the insurance industry could dramatically improve preventive care management. Ultimately, AI systems can help organisations and healthcare professionals to improve the level of care they provide to their patients, making life better for both individuals and society as a whole.