(Finance) – The advent of artificial intelligence is transforming all industrial sectors, revolutionizing decision-making processes and models. In the financial market, the integration of AI and quality data opens up new opportunities to improve relationships with customers and optimize performance.
The impact of AI was discussed at the annual event Tomorrow Speaks by CRIF, now in its 14th edition which this year had as its title “AI & CRIF Metadata: customer-centric finance”. An occasion where 50 top managers from banks, insurance companies, trade associations, as well as institutions and the academic world, discussed how these technologies are transforming relationships with customers, both retail and corporate.
During the event held in Milan and in digital streaming, CRIF collected the opinions of the most important market players on how these tools will guide the evolution of the financial industry in the coming years. At the center of the discussion is the importance and the role of data, unique and quality, without which artificial intelligence could not exist. We discussed how progressive digitalisation, from the arrival of the web until today, has created a wealth of data which, thanks to the right technologies, predictive models and algorithms, allows AI to generate unprecedented results.
The debate also focused on the topic of management of customer services. While we recognize cost reduction as a priority for the sector, the real challenge in the medium to long term is represented by the opportunities that the combination of data and AI offers to improve relationships with customers. The objective is to respond more effectively to their needs, helping to improve revenues and margins. CRIF – which can count on a team of more than 300 AI experts and over 1,500 ICT professionals – outlined during the event how generative AI is opening up new perspectives and challenges in the financial sector, illustrating the applications and case studies concrete use already implemented for some of its customers.
“I am convinced that artificial intelligence – he underlines Alessandro Foti, CEO of FinecoBank – represents a great opportunity, a trend destined to influence the approaches and strategies of companies in the financial sector. As Fineco, we believe that the objective of technological evolution is not innovation as an end in itself: AI can represent a way to be closer to our customers and consultants, obtaining increasingly higher satisfaction from them.”
“The banking system – he declares Edoardo Ginevra, co-general manager CFO of Banco BPM – is called upon to deal with technological innovation at 360 degrees and has already been doing so for some time, improving, for example, the use of services by customers with advantages that impact costs, quality and the environment. Based on the Banco BPM experience, I am thinking of Digital Identity which encourages remote interaction and is significantly reducing paper for contracts and communications, the use of the Virtual Assistant on APPs to make responses to questions more immediate customers, requiring the intervention of contact center operators only by exception, or to the fact that 20% of sales take place remotely. Artificial Intelligence, in particular generative intelligence, is a new challenge that we have taken up by expanding its potential in various areas of development and which changes operational and organizational models, at the same time putting us before the complexity of the measurability of data and their management . As a Group, we have included in the Industrial Plan the actions we want to undertake to govern this trend, seizing its potential in terms of business and improving customer service.”
“REVO positions itself as a unique operator of its kind in the Italian insurance landscape thanks to the experimental adoption of innovative technologies such as artificial intelligence in strategic areas such as Underwriting, Claims Management and Distribution. With a digital mentality and a flexible structure, – he states Alberto Minali, CEO of REVO Insurance – it is in our nature to adapt quickly to future challenges. In the coming months, we will continue to focus on AI to improve our operational efficiency and create new business opportunities.”
“I was lucky enough to experience the application of artificial intelligence in different sectors: the financial one and the defense industry. AI – he declares Alessandro Profumo, president of Rialto Ventures – it can be a phenomenal engine to support people’s activities, but we must always ask ourselves clearly: how can my business change thanks to AI?”.
“In Findomestic, innovation is not understood as a mere pursuit of technological development. It is an attitude, a cultural process which – he states Marco Tarantola, CEO and general manager of Findomestic Banca – aims to find solutions that are able to improve the quality and effectiveness of the work of our Partners and the experience of our Customers. This is the approach we share at Findomestic, towards AI specifically and towards new technologies in general. It’s about recognizing and identifying the potential of these new tools and maximizing them to achieve the objective that guides all our actions: that of being alongside our customers in the most reactive, innovative and concrete way possible.”
“The financial sector, with its vast amount of data and the power of IT systems,” he underlines Fabrizio Viola, chairman and founding partner of CAP Advisory – is one of the most promising for the adoption of artificial intelligence. Thanks to open banking and PSD2, the competitive landscape has been profoundly redesigned, opening up spaces especially for new fintech operators. AI is revolutionizing the industry, enabling the development of new products, improved customer experiences and greater operational efficiency through process automation, offering unprecedented opportunities for growth and innovation.”
Generative AI and the new “customer-centric” financial era
Generative AI offers the possibility of strengthening the relationship between customers and companies, making the management of their needs more fluid and personalized and thus revolutionizing the financial sector. This technology not only improves the customer experience, making interaction simpler and more intuitive, but also reduces waiting times and lightens the workload on human support teams, optimizing resource management. To do just one example in the banking sectorall the activities linked to the decision-making processes, from ex-ante analyzes to ex-post evaluations, can now be re-engineered, integrating within them linguistic models capable of preparing drafts of the main documents and re-reading the notes produced by the operators to verify that all company policies have been respected.
A concrete case presented at the event is the application developed by CRIF with Generative AI for preliminary phase and origination of business loans. This tool automates the analysis of company documents, such as financial statements and real estate appraisals, transforming the manual extraction of KPIs into a precise and efficient process. Another case is the innovative CRIF tool for second level controls in bankswhich automates the analysis of credit dossiers, streamlining the process through automatic pre-assessment which allows operators to process 100% of the cases.
Creating value with data and AI for families and businesses
Traditional AI, with machine learning and predictive algorithms, has long been an ally in the financial sector for assessing and monitoring the solvency of retail and corporate customers and enhancing Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) indicators. With machine learning techniques, CRIF has already developed advanced models to evaluate the reliability of companies, the ability of private individuals to support financing, predict the risk of customer abandonment, analyze the probability of accidents in the insurance sector and monitor the risk of fraud in specific transactions. For example, in the increasingly important area of sustainability and ESG factors, CRIF develops one automatic score for each of the over 5 million Italian companies, using more than 160 variables from different sources, to generate the three main indicators (environmental, social and governance) and a final summary score. Another example concerns the measurement of the physical risks of a propertyevaluating exposure to 28 environmental risks and then calculating the possible economic damage in the event of a natural event. This world of data is the context in which the AI Act finds its expression today, which formalizes the quality, equity and governance safeguards for the responsible use of artificial intelligence. “The financial sector is going through a phase of radical transformation, driven by the integration of advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence and, today, with Generative AI. These solutions, together with the irreplaceable power of data, – declares Marco Colombo, Managing Director Finance Italy of CRIF – are revolutionizing customer interaction, making processes more fluid, personalized and immediate, while improving operational efficiency. At CRIF, AI has been part of our daily work for at least 15 years and today we are also pioneers in GenAI. We firmly believe that the combination of AI and high-quality data represents a strategic lever not only to optimize risk management but also to anticipate the needs of families and businesses, thus creating value through increasingly customer-centric experiences and bringing concrete benefits in terms of profitability and consolidation of customer trust”.