Sales process automation software for Financial Services

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[Music] hi my name is Luke Thomas ER vice president of appen Asia Pacific in Japan and we're here in Melbourne today with our industry vice president of financial services guy metric to talk about financial services Trends and AI process automation guy welcome to Melvin thanks so much for coming to join us thanks Luke delighted to be here what in your experience are the challenges we're seeing in financial services institutions are these similar to what you've seen in other parts of the world I think the whole world is in the grip of a high interest rate environment um lots of discussions about how long that will last probably longer than many people expect that has a real impact on the way that banks are able to run their businesses lending for instance uh becomes much more profitable but an existing loan book potentially is more at risk from uh potential issues around ability of customers to pay back their money there's also other um issues around the profitability of organizations after we've had low interest rates for so long and this is I think a a a big driver for some of the change that we're seeing in financial services both here in Australia but also globally as well some of the things I think are also very prevalent are given the uh issues that some of the US uh Regional Banks had last year um I think compliance and regulation will continue to Bear Down on the organ on the industry I think Australia is a very regulated heavily regulated Financial Services industry here and I think that that will uh Cascade across globally we're already seeing a new legislation coming in Europe around operational resilience uh Australia has similar regulations in place and I think that that is going to also be a big driver for change across the industry so there are a lot of headwinds but there are also a lot of opportunities I think for organizations that are able to embrace that change and adapt uh for them to be very successful and where are you seeing Australian Financial Services institutions leading the way so I think technology and their adoption especially around uh some of the Innovation around fintech organizations here in Australia I think have shown how organiz s can rapidly um disintermediate Financial Services I think the adoption of Technology um within those fintech firms I think is is creating a driver for change within some of the other Financial Services organizations the larger firms and I think that is a very interesting uh situation for the Australian Market I also think that some of the new technology that people are seeing you know around genitor of AI and machine learning learning um I think the organizations here are been seen as early adopters and I think that's going to have of quite profound impact on the industry the whole industry from retail to banking to corporate banking so I think that's very interesting and I think uh uh internationally Financial Services FS could probably learn a lot from what's taking place here in the Australian Market what are the most significant benefits that AI process automation platforms have brought to the financial Services industry both in Australia but also globally so if you think about the real drivers uh the goals that Financial Services organizations have you you can typically boil it down to to three areas it's about growing revenues delivering an improved better customer experience it's about managing your costs uh and making sure that uh your organizations are run as efficiently as possible and clearly the third element is around control of your r RK and your compliance obligations and being able to demonstrate that you have the appropriate controls in place to manage the risk and ensure that you're delivering against the regulations in which your firms operate and AI process automation can actually deliver against all of those three um uh business goals and I think that's quite important because this isn't just about a revenue growth story or a cost efficiency story it's about improving the way that the business runs itself but also the way that it interacts with its customers and therefore this can have a really profound impact in the way that customers um are treated by their financial services uh organizations but also how efficiently and how effectively those Industries are run so it can have really dramatic impact in a number of different ways across an organization the other thing if it's done correctly is it allows these organizations the ability to change and evolve and as you know there are some real drivers in the industry for change um things like um regulation again upcoming regulation but also the idea of new technology customer expectations all of these external drivers for change are are being inhibited by various issues that exist within Financial Services organizations you've got Legacy architecture you've got Silo data you've got huge levels of complexity that exists within these organizations and if you're able to use technology in a way that allows and facilitates change within the organization and the ability to adapt to meet all of those change drivers then that puts you in a very very strong position guy would you mind sharing some examples of where you've seen process automation initiatives within the financial services industry successfully applied if you think about where complex uh processes exist within a financial services organizations one where those processes really matter the first one and most obvious one is in the customer journey and that includes not only the onboarding of new customers or if they're existing customers but having new products and managing all of the complexity around those processes both from a risk perspective but also from a regulatory perspective if you are able to apply process automation to those elements of work that is involved within a financial services organization managing that process then that can give real tangible benefits it doesn't end there though because as you start to interact with that customer they have queries they have questions that they need to address there's a lot of communication between the organization and that Financial Services firm and all of that can be managed much more effectively uh with process automation so that customer Journey right the way through to you know the successful offboarding of that customer is a complex set of processes that benefit tremendously from AI process automation the second area is is really around operational excellence um if you're looking at your complex operational processes being able to optimize them from an efficiency and Effectiveness perspective um that provides huge opportunities for process automation being able to link together disperate Point Solutions with existing data with within them those those kind of processes are typically done by people managing togging between screens cutting you know uh data into Excel spreadsheets and emailing it that is a prime area for process automation but it has to be the right um platform because what you need to do is surface data from many different uh applications uh combine it with data from other systems to allow you to run a process off the back of it and if you're able to do that then you're really able ble to start delivering some real efficiency improvements and also enable you to start embedding your risk controls directly into those automated processes and the third area where we have seen a huge amount of growth since the financial crisis in 2008 2009 is around governance risk and compliance and managing effectively those risk and compliance processes that exist across all three lines of defense for risk management so you have your group functions group risk compliance group Finance uh internal audit all of these functions have grown tremendously in scope and the uh work needed to do in order to comply with the regulations over the last 14 15 years those functions are ripe opportunities for process automation to help them run those processes more effectively and efficiently but also provide much greater visibility on those processes for Auditors for The Regulators to actually show that you in control of those processes and you're delivering against your compliance obligations what would you see as the critical technology Trends over the next you know two to three years that uh will be really um relevant in the financial services industry going forward both here in Australia and also across the globe well the huge question is clearly around AI generative AI um and the impact that that's going to have across all areas of financial services there's already a huge debate about um how quickly that technology is going to impact the industry I personally think it's probably going to be sooner than 2 to three years I think you will start to see some real change over the next 12 months or so but there's still a lot of debate as to how best to meet the regulatory requirements that Financial Services organizations have in an environment where there are some very open uh large language models chat GPT for instance and how they comply with their responsibilities around data protection but also meet their obligations in terms of understanding the the ways in which those decisions and that Insight is being made now there's this whole debate going on about private versus public AI private AI means you have a large language model that's trained on your data it doesn't get shared with other data and insight from other firms that then allows you to be much more programmatic about uh the data that is being fed to train the models and that allows you to be much more controlled in terms of things that you might want to avoid like hallucinations or indeed bias what that also allows you to do if it's done properly is it allows you to arrive at much more defensible outcome so you're able to explain how those models ended up with the Insight or the outcomes that they were that they were proposing using the data that you've had and clearly within your organization there's another benefit as well you you're protecting your organizations data you're sharing with other organizations and therefore I think private AI is going to be much more prevalent within heavily R regulated Industries like Financial Services rather than some of these more open models like uh chat GPT if that's the case then I think that there are some really strong use cases for the technology across Financial Services both in the ways that you impact the uh uh the way that your customers interact with your organization but also in the way that you make use of the data that's within your organization but spread over such a large uh uh disperate set of systems and databases using AI to be able to uh gain Insight from all of that disperate information I think it's going to be transfer informational within financial services and I think there are many more use cases especially around risk and compliance where these large language models are going to start having a very profound impact I'm optimistic that um the impact that uh Ai and gen is going to have within Financial Services is going to happen much more quickly than people think and and be quite profound in terms of the impact it's fascinating to hear the stories you're sharing about what trends you're seeing both here in Australia and globally and how technology has a real influence on uh supporting uh Financial Service institutions i' love to understand what you're observing around how AP and supporting those financial services institutions to apply that Innovation so so apion is an AI process automation platform what that uh means is that we're able to utilize uh across this unified platform a range of of Technologies and capabil ities that support automation of processes and the surfacing of data from many different systems into common processes now process automation doesn't always mean straight through processing sometimes it can mean Gathering of data to allow your business's smmes to make better quicker more effective decisions using all of the information that is available to them and has been gathered and presented to them in an easy to consume format so process automation for me is is really about uh bringing together technology processes people and data and if you do that in a way that is flexible enough to be not only delivered in in the time scales that your businesses need but then also to be able to be adapted as changing business needs changing Regulatory and risk needs dictate then you have a very very powerful capability ility to not only deliver against all of those uh goals that we discussed earlier on around customer experience process efficiency and risk but also provide an environment in which that organization is Nimble enough to be able to adapt to changes and and that platform approach that appion is leading the way with I think is absolutely the right way to go from a process and data perspective working within the existing environment that com companies already have in order to be able to deliver that uh automated experience that digital experience uh and deliver on those goals that we were discussing you on thanks Guy uh insightful to hear your observations and what you're' seeing around Financial Services here in Australia and also around the globe uh we really appreciate you coming to join us here in Australia uh thanks again my pleasure thanks Luke [Music]