AI Is Disrupting the Future of FinTech

Finance, like many other industries, is utilizing Artificial Intelligence (AI) more than ever before. Financial bots are nothing new; they scrape news websites for breaking content that might affect financial markets and traders’ decisions. But FinTech, as it’s aptly named, is getting smarter with self-learning algorithms.

These algorithms use neural networks (more on that here) to “learn” habits over time. This helps accomplish feats like predicting behavior and market trends. In risk management, for example, executives expect AI to play an enormous role in their field within a few years. But you don’t have to look to the future of FinTech to see AI in action. Currently, FinTech companies are finding new ways to innovate with AI by combining it with other facets of modern society, like social media and cybersecurity.

Making FinTech Social

Social media and web presence are already making a change in how lenders perceive loan applicants. SoFi, a San Francisco app developer, uses your education, career experience, income vs. expense ratio, and financial history to determine your loan qualification. This is unlike a traditional bank that heavily relies on your personal credit score, and it’s garnered the startup more than $400 million in funding.

AI-powered chatbots reply to customers, executives, and salespeople in any company location. There are a few SaaS applications for developers to quickly set up complex chatbots in less than a week, and finance firms are acting on it. In fact, investment in FinTech companies rose to $23 billion in 2016.

Small and large companies are utilizing chatbots to help drive sales, help guide budgets, and even take orders from social media channels. These “robo-advisors” are prepared to handle even the most complex of customer requests. If this trend continues, it won’t be long until AI is handling the majority of customer requests, with the touch of human help being reserved for the most perplexing problems coming down the pipeline.

Optimizing With AI

Recent cybersecurity innovation has been a rat race to keep up with the refined sophistication of new hacking attacks. Anti-viruses and other run-of-the-mill tactics are not as effective as they once were. Because of this, security experts have begun using AI to augment companies’ abilities to detect fraud, spot suspicious transactions, and even predict future attacks.

Because it is scalable to a company’s size and can analyze much larger amounts of data than previous paradigms, AI is often the backbone of these improvements. Machine learning is drastically reducing processing time, duplicate expenses, and human error through its ability to “learn” patterns. The ability of AI to process vast amounts of data is also allowing financial firms to make more educated decisions in complicated matters. By automating tasks like generating expense reports, AI is enabling companies to utilize more recent and accurate information before committing to a strategy.

A New Era of Finance

AI is affecting so many aspects of finance that it’s hard to believe this technology is relatively new to the industry. It’s strange to think that AI is simultaneously being used to gather information on loan applicants while protecting information deemed sensitive by financial institutions.

It just goes to show that AI is still a technological tool at the end of the day, and what it’s used for depends on who’s using it. With these current developments in AI, FinTech will never be the same. And this is just the beginning.