Through the lens of Financial Risk, this blog series will focus on Financial Institutions as a premier business use case for Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning.
Today, opportunities exist for professionals to delegate time-intensive, dense, and complex tasks to machines. Machine Learning (ML) has the ability to automate Artificial Intelligence (AI) and is becoming much more robust as technological advances ease and lessen resource constraints.
Financial Institutions (FI) are constantly under pressure to keep up with evolving technology and regulatory requirements. Compared to what has been used in the past, modern tools have become more user-friendly and flexible; they are also easily integrated with existing systems. This evolution is enabling advanced tools such as ML to regain relevance across industries, including finance.
So, how does ML work? Imagine someone is learning to throw a football. Over time, the to-be quarterback is trained to understand how to adjust the speed of the ball, the strength of the throw, and the path of trajectory to meet the expected routes of the receivers. In a similar way, machines are trained to perform a specific task, such as clustering, by means of an algorithm. Just as the quarterback is trained by a coach, a machine learns to perform a specific task from an ML algorithm. This expands the possibilities for ways technology can be used to add value to the business.
What does this mean for FIs? The benefit of ML is that value can be added in areas where efficiency, prediction, and accuracy are most critical. To accomplish this, the company aligns these four components: data, applications, infrastructure, and business needs.
The level of data maturity of FIs determines their capacity for effectively utilizing both structured and unstructured data. A well-established data governance framework lays the foundation for proper use of data for a company. Once their structured data is effectively governed, sourced, analyzed, and managed, they can then employ more advanced tools such as ML to supplement their internal operations. Unstructured data can also be used, but the company must first harness the tools and computing power capable of handling it.
Many companies are turning to cloud computing for their business-as-usual processes and for deploying ML. There are options for hosting cloud computing either on-premises or with public cloud services, but these are a matter of preference. Either method provides scalable computing power, which is essential when using ML algorithms to unlock the potential value that massive amounts of data provides.
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Hannah Wiser is an assistant consultant with FRG. After graduating with her Master’s in Quantitative Economics and Econometrics from East Carolina University in 2019, she joined FRG and has worked on projects focusing on technical communication and data governance.
