‘Why Artificial Intelligence, Data Remain Critical To Banking’

Reportedly, while AI creates intelligent machines that work and react like humans, the technology offers banks the opportunity to reinvent processes and gain unprecedented advantages, especially as extremely large data are being analysed to reveal patterns, trends, and associations, which relate to human behaviour and interactions.

Unanimously, the Managing Director, FBN, Dr. Adeshola Adeduntan; Product Partnerships Lead, Paystack, Khadija Abu; Academic Director, Lagos Business School, Pan African University, Olayinka David-West; Managing Director, Nigeria for Mines, Adia Sowho; Country General Manager, Microsoft, Akin Banuso; among others, noted that initiative such as the FirstBank Digital Lab would imbue in developers the knowledge and skills needed to address the challenges in the financial industry through the use of AI and big data.

If rightly deployed, the experts expect the development to enable the banking industry to meet customer expectations, predict their customers, identify trend, address challenges of anti-money laundering, create identity analytics and provide insightful trading, as well as seamless fraud recognition.

Explaining the reasons why the gap must be bridged, Awosika, said: “There is the need to create a bridge that links what you know and what we know together, to create a new door for the future that we are building. It is about creating the right room where all these things are done by the right generation of people.

“Our digital lab is setup to be the bridge between the people and the knowledge that is emanating daily. The digital lab is the place we explore the things we know, with the things you are making up. Statistics globally show that the youthful population is the population right now. We should be concerned about how they live, what they do and how they think. We should foresee the future, before they see it.”

While Adeduntan believes that banks must make the most out of the disruptive change to remain competitive, he insisted that artificial intelligence and big data technologies must become part and parcel of business models across the board.

Adeduntan, whose company recently invested about N5.2 million in a coding Hackathon competition, cautioned players against channelling too much investment in old systems, at a time when some actors use the new technology so enthusiastically.