AI-empowered risk management speeds up financial intelligence

Intelligent risk management is the widest and the most dynamic application of artificial intelligence in the financial world, thanks to its decisive role in improving financial institutions’ efficiency and reducing their operational risks, industry insiders said on Saturday.

Among the use scenarios of AI in the financial industry, intelligent risk management business now has a market share of around one third and it is speeding up the whole sector’s intelligence level, said Huang Xiangqian, CEO of Shanghai Xinyan AI Technology at a forum during the World Artificial Intelligence Conference.

Since 2016, people have enjoyed a totally different financial service experience, due to the prevalence of smartphones and mobile payment as well as the wide-spread use of underlying technological support by big data and AI, Huang said.

AI has been helping banks, insurance companies and other traditional financial service providers to break the technical barriers of their conventional practice of risk control.

Take banks for example. It used to take a lot of time and effort for bank staff to grant loans offline, as they have to visit customers in person, do on-site investigations and make a face-to-face signing. The approval procedure is long and involves great manual effort.

Now with AI, banks can make a comprehensive evaluation of the applicant’s credit based on massive data related to his or her daily life, say, their consumption and communications records and behavior on social networking platforms. And the whole process from loan granting to loan collection can be managed in an orderly and efficient way.

“In this sense, artificial intelligence technology plays a decisive role in improving the efficiency and accuracy of banks’ lending and reducing their business risks,” Huang added.

As technologies like facial recognition and optical character recognition become more mature and are widely adopted, financial institutions can further enhance their intelligent risk management capabilities, especially in areas of anti-fraud and loan management.

In the future, with the large-scale application of block chain technology and 5G, Xinyan predicts that the new generation of artificial intelligence technology can revolutionize the business operation, risk control and post loan-granting management of the entire financial industry.

Founded in 2016, the financial technology startup now offers intelligent risk control services to more than 2,000 online finance platforms and traditional financial institutions, assisting them in making evaluations about the borrowers’ repayment ability.