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Speaker "Dr. Usama Fayyad" Details Back

 

Topic

How to make AI really work in the enterprise - case studies in AI for Fintech

Abstract

In this talk we address the growing role of AI in Fintech, and the opportunity to leverage data to enable pragmatic AI that works to address important issues. These opportunities for AI-driven contributions span different areas of what we think of as the “traditional financial institution model” where Fintech can disrupt it in meaningful and productive ways:  These disruptions include categories like:

 
1) Front Office:  Considering that front office activities generate a good portion of the cost of delivering product and servicing customers, AI can inject human intelligence in understanding customer interactions and intentions, understanding context, reducing costs of customer service operations and determining predictive insights like Next-best-action
 
2) Back Office: Costly and often riddled with manual operations/interventions, back-office activities are complex and time-consuming. AI is well-placed to intelligently enhance and accelerate certain critical functions like: Compliance, Financial crime prevention and Workflow management, from simple RPA to more sophisticated execution of more complex tasks and decisions
 
 3) Financial Advisory: requiring a deep understanding of customer needs, lots of time on understanding the context of the customer and the matching to the right financial products. The offerings of financial products have become overwhelming and bewildering. AI can accelerate the context gathering and updating, and can both reduce the complexity of products and options by mapping benefits and running through scenarios that make it easy to understand.  
 
4) Risk Modeling: while foundational to financial services, there is a heavy reliance on humans understanding the risk and assessing it. Partially automated through AI enabling many new approaches to this important and expensive function: new ways of scoring risk, credit, and needs inclusive of external data from social media and other sources. Better understanding of the behavioral data associated with a customer to infer intent and to infer events relevant to risk triggers.
 
Many other areas of opportunities exist – e.g. creating more sophisticated identity determination, such as vision, fingerprint, voice recognition, and keystroke analysis - beyond traditional biometrics. There are many additional areas in finance, treasury, custody, and integration of AI and Data driven methods to help banks deal more effectively with corporate clients and other counterparts. Truly the areas where Fintech can disrupt, and the areas where AI can turbo-charge this disruption are numerous.

Profile

Usama is Chairman at Open Insights focusing on AI, BigData strategy, and new business models for Data. He is the Inaugural Executive Director of the Institute for Experiential AI at Northeastern University where he is also professor of computer science. He was Global Chief Data Officer at Barclays Bank in London (2013-2016) after launching a key tech startup accelerator in MENA (2010-2013) as Executive Chairman of Oasis500. He was Chairman/CEO/CTO at several Seattle/Silicon Valley tech startups and the first person to hold the title: Chief Data Officer when Yahoo! acquired his 2nd startup in 2004. He held leadership roles at Microsoft (1996-2000) and founded the Machine Learning Systems group at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (1989-1996) where he was awarded Caltech’s top Excellence in Research award & a U.S. Government medal from NASA. Usama published over 100 technical articles, holds over 30 patents, is a Fellow of both Association for Advancement of Artificial Intelligence and the Association of Computing Machinery. He is a recipient of both the ACM SIGKDD Awards for Innovation and for Service. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan and holds two BSE’s in Electrical and Computer Engineering, MSE Computer Engineering and M.Sc. in Mathematics.