I just joined Huawei for their summit themed “Beyond Digital, Resilience Empowers AI-infused Finance”. It was interesting and Jason Cao, CEO of Huawei Digital Finance, gave a speech that was insightful around creating convenience with security through AI. One line that stood out for me is:
“We must neither underestimate the long-term value of AI for the financial industry, nor blindly overestimate its short-term value. Instead, we must proactively deploy and explore for the future, step by step.”
Why?
Because there is so much hype and bluster about AI today that you can easily lose the plot. Long-term it is obvious that AI is a gamechanger. As I’ve been blogging for the last week* it’s as big, if not bigger, than mobile and cloud and those two technologies created the fintech industry. Imagine what AI will create.
Well, you don’t need to imagine. As Huawei and others are imagining for you. A future where you no longer have to access, you delegate. A future where the online and app services are dealt with by agents, not you. A future where you don’t have to think about money because money thinks for you.
That’s funny, as that was the subtext of my last book Intelligent Money, yet this is where we are. We are in a time where financial providers are purely feeding data to our bots, and our bots are feeding data to bank’s bots. Everything is data and networked, and AI is providing the intelligence to those systems to ensure they work effectively together.
As Huawie’s Jason Cao stated: Human-machine collaboration is evolving from "people + tools" to "people + AI colleagues," creating a new model where "one person can complete tasks as a team”.
It is the integration of human and machine intelligence. What does this mean practically? It means that we now operate in a world of networks, and the ability to reach the human – the real-world consumer – is becoming harder and harder, as the human – the real-world consumer – does not want to connect with you directly. More and more barriers are rising to human connectivity both from the bank and to the bank. From the bank, the consumer is ignoring most messaging as there is too much. To the bank, the bank is ignoring the customer by building barriers to human access, typically called 30-minute call centre wait times to get through to a human.
The result is that we live in a world of layers of technology that are meant to make life easier but, when it goes wrong, makes life a lot harder. What it needs is a lot more interpretation of data. That’s what AI will hopefully deliver. Interpretation, creating wisdom and knowledge.
Huawei think they have sorted this out with a thing called FAB, their FinAgent Booster. This technology aims to ensure a bank can deploy Agentic AI efficiently. Of course there are other solutions, but Huawei's aim is to create innovation solutions by working across the ecosystem with partners and joint solutions.
Huawei’s conference made me realise that there is a vision out there to make life easier, but it is still to emerge. As Jason said: “The leap from data to knowledge allows AI to better understand financial services”. Oh, I hope so …
For more information, you could click here to go: Huawei Launches FinAgent Booster, And Global Showcases in Banking, Insurance, and Securities
* Recent relevant blogs:
We are in a third generation of change in finance. When I wrote Digital Bank over a decade ago, the focus was all about reinventing banking from being physical at the core to being digital at the core. Now we have to do it all again and reach the next level where the bank is intelligent…
Becoming intelligent: the next wave of disruption
I was thinking more about this third revolution of financial technologies. The first was very much focused upon automation administration using mainframe computing; the second moved from pure cost reduction to the changing dynamics of how to leverage productivity and cost using the network effects of connectivity, and driven by cloud and mobile; the third…
If digital is at the core, when do you need to be physical?
Building on the last two blogs all companies, not just in finance, have been transformed through the connected, network economy. That was the last decade’s worth of digital transformation and has led analogue companies hoping that they are now digital natives, although many are digital immigrants, still with a log of their old analogue systems…
Chris M Skinner
Chris Skinner is best known as an independent commentator on the financial markets through his blog, TheFinanser.com, as author of the bestselling book Digital Bank, and Chair of the European networking forum the Financial Services Club. He has been voted one of the most influential people in banking by The Financial Brand (as well as one of the best blogs), a FinTech Titan (Next Bank), one of the Fintech Leaders you need to follow (City AM, Deluxe and Jax Finance), as well as one of the Top 40 most influential people in financial technology by the Wall Street Journal's Financial News. To learn more click here...