There’s no doubt that the finance industry is undergoing a transformational change. To provide superior service to their customers and outdo the competition, financial institutions are using the latest technologies to understand customer needs, identify opportunities, stay competitive, solve business problems and streamline back-office operations.
The recent years have seen a rapid acceleration in the pace of disruptive technologies such as AI and Machine Learning in Finance due to improved software and hardware. The finance sector, specifically, has seen a steep rise in the use cases of machine learning applications to advance better outcomes for both consumers and businesses.
Why Use Machine Learning in Finance?
Here are some of the reasons why banking and financial services firms should consider using Machine Learning despite having the above-said challenges
- Enhanced revenues owing to better productivity and improved user experience
- Low operational costs due to process automation
- Reinforced security and better compliance
Here are a few use cases where machine learning algorithms can be/are being used in the finance sector –
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Financial Monitoring
Machine learning algorithms can be used to enhance network security significantly. Data scientists are always working on training systems to detect flags such as money laundering techniques, which can be prevented by financial monitoring. The future holds a high possibility of machine learning technologies powering the most advanced cybersecurity networks.
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Making Investment Predictions
The fact that machine learning-enabled technologies give advanced market insights allows the fund managers to identify specific market changes much earlier as compared to the traditional investment models. With renowned firms such as Bank of America, JPMorgan, and Morgan Stanley investing heavily in ML technologies to develop automated investment advisors, the disruption in the investment banking industry is quite evident.
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Process Automation
Machine Learning-powered solutions allow finance companies to completely replace manual work by automating repetitive tasks through intelligent process automation for enhanced business productivity. Chatbots, paperwork automation, and employee training gamification are some of the examples of process automation in finance using machine learning. This enables finance companies to improve their customer experience, reduce costs, and scale up their services. Further, Machine Learning technology can easily access the data, interpret behaviors, follow and recognize the patterns.
This could be readily used for customer support systems that can work similarly to a real human and solve all of the customers’ unique queries. An example of this is Wells Fargo using ML-driven chatbot through Facebook Messenger to communicate with its users effectively. The chatbot helps customers get all the information they need regarding their accounts and passwords.
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Secure Transactions
Machine Learning algorithms are excellent at detecting transactional frauds by analyzing millions of data points that tend to go unnoticed by humans. Further, ML also reduces the number of false rejections and helps improve the precision of real-time approvals. These models are generally built on the client’s behavior on the internet and transaction history. Apart from spotting fraudulent behavior with high accuracy, ML-powered technology is also equipped to identify suspicious account behavior and prevent fraud in real-time instead of detecting them after the crime has already been committed.
According to research, for almost every $1 lost to fraud, the recovery costs borne by financial institutions are close to $2.92. One of the most successful applications of ML is credit card fraud detection. Banks are generally equipped with monitoring systems that are trained on historical payments data. Algorithm training, validation, and backtesting are based on vast datasets of credit card transaction data. ML-powered classification algorithms can easily label events as fraud versus non-fraud to stop fraudulent transactions in real-time.
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Risk Management
Using machine learning techniques, banks and financial institutions can significantly lower the risk levels by analyzing a massive volume of data sources. Unlike the traditional methods which are usually limited to essential information such as credit score, ML can analyze significant volumes of personal information to reduce their risk.
Various insights gathered by machine learning technology also provide banking and financial services organizations with actionable intelligence to help them make subsequent decisions. An example of this could be machine learning programs tapping into different data sources for customers applying for loans and assigning risk scores to them. ML algorithms could then easily predict the customers who are at risk for defaulting on their loans to help companies rethink or adjust terms for each customer.
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Algorithmic Trading
Machine Learning in trading is another excellent example of an effective use case in the finance industry. Algorithmic Trading (AT) has, in fact, become a dominant force in global financial markets. ML-based solutions and models allow trading companies to make better trading decisions by closely monitoring the trade results and news in real-time to detect patterns that can enable stock prices to go up or down.
Machine learning algorithms can also analyze hundreds of data sources simultaneously, giving the traders a distinct advantage over the market average. Some of the other benefits of Algorithm Trading include –
a]Increased accuracy and reduced chances of mistakes
b]AT allows trades to be executed at the best possible prices
c]Human errors are likely to be reduced substantially
d]Enables the automatic and simultaneous checking of multiple market conditions
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Financial Advisory
There are various budget management apps powered by machine learning, which can offer customers the benefit of highly specialized and targeted financial advice and guidance. Machine Learning algorithms not only allow customers to track their spending on a daily basis using these apps but also help them analyze this data to identify their spending patterns, followed by identifying the areas where they can save.
One of the other rapidly emerging trends in this context is Robo-advisors. Working like regular advisors, they specifically target investors with limited resources (individuals and small to medium-sized businesses) who wish to manage their funds. These ML-based Robo-advisors can apply traditional data processing techniques to create financial portfolios and solutions such as trading, investments, retirement plans, etc. for their users.
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Customer Data Management
When it comes to banks and financial institutions, data is the most crucial resource, making efficient data management central to the growth and success of the business.
The massive volume and structural diversity of financial data from mobile communications, social media activity to transactional details, and market data make it a big challenge even for financial specialists to process it manually. Integrating machine learning techniques to manage such large volumes of data can bring both process efficiency and the benefit of extracting real intelligence from data.
AI and ML tools such as data analytics, data mining, and natural language processing, help to get valuable insights from data for better business profitability. An excellent example of this could be machine learning algorithms used for analyzing the influence of market developments and specific financial trends from the financial data of the customers.
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Decision-Making
Banking and financial institutions can use Machine Learning algorithms to analyze both structured and unstructured data. E.g., customer requests, social media interactions, and various business processes internal to the company, and discover trends (both useful and potentially dangerous) to assess risk and help customers make informed decisions accurately.
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Customer Service Level Improvement
Using an intelligent chatbot, customers can get all their queries resolved in terms of finding out their monthly expenses, loan eligibility, affordable insurance plan, and much more.
Further, there are several ML-based applications that, when connected to a payment system, can analyze accounts and let customers save and grow their money. Sophisticated ML algorithms can be used to analyze user behavior and develop customized offers. For example, a customer looking to invest in a financial plan can be benefitted from a personalized investment offer after the ML algorithm analyses his/her existing financial situation.
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Customer Retention Program
Credit card companies can use ML technology to predict at-risk customers and specifically retain selected ones out of these. Based on user demographic data and transaction activity, they can easily predict user behavior and design offers specifically for these customers. The application here includes a predictive, binary classification model to find out the customers at risk, followed by utilizing a recommender model to determine best-suited card offers that can help to retain these customers.
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Marketing
The ability of AI and Machine Learning models to make accurate predictions based on past behavior makes them a great marketing tool. From analyzing the mobile app usage, web activity, and responses to previous ad campaigns, machine learning algorithms can help to create a robust marketing strategy for finance companies.