Bianca Chan
Hi, everyone. I’m Bianca Chan and welcome to the Buzz from Bank Automation News, where we explore how automation technology is transforming the banking industry. This is our weekly wrap for what’s happening in the industry this week. Before beginning, I’d like to give a big thanks to  our sponsor and advertiser MX, thank you so much for your support. I’m pleased to be joined by Loraine Lawson, associate editor at Bank Automation News. It is March 5, 2021. And here are the biggest news items from our editorial team this week. Loraine, you attended a couple of automation virtual summits this week, tell us what you found out?

Loraine Lawson
Well, the Forrester analysts spoke about what they call digital decisions. And that is the ability to use business logic informed by analytics and coupled with automation to create routine, repeatable operational decisions, or customer decisions.

Bianca Chan
Okay, so something like if there was a decision to be made, whether to approve someone for a loan, you would kind of code in that business logic and be able to say, if someone has a credit score of this much or more than approve and use the automation in that sense,

Loraine Lawson
exactly. He said, it’s specifically that good use cases for a digital decision are those that involve real time decisions, operational decisions, and of course, large data sets, things that people aren’t able to do very well.

Bianca Chan
Right, right. You also, I think you explored a couple of other use cases, at the intersection of artificial intelligence and automation. Were there any sort of other key highlights there in terms of successful use cases that that financial institutions can use both technologies in?

Loraine Lawson
Yes. Of course, Forrester pointed out that the examining transactions to determine if fraud is present is a good use case for banks, and of course, whether or not to approve a loan, but also things like determining the best customer discounts to apply to maintain loyalty. And if you’re talking about use cases at another conference, this week, the Business Week AI summit, Keith Kirkpatrick from, um, dia, it’s pronounced o m, di, a, offered a list of a finance personalization use cases. So we’ve written a lot about personalization, and automation. And many of these we’ve talked about, but some of the examples include risk assessment and compliance personal financial advisors. Oh, yeah, I know, you’ve covered before, right?

Bianca Chan
Yeah, yeah, it’s a hot area for insights, AI and automation, for sure.

Loraine Lawson
claims processing, credit scoring and loan analysis, I’m seeing more and more about using AI for credit scoring, and then human emotion analysis. And then of course, of course, algorithmic trading strategy, performance improvement, which would just mean using algorithms to determine your trading strategy.

Bianca Chan
Interesting. Okay. So I guess we we should expect to see at least some of these trends kind of crop up in our reporting over the over the next few months, at least as we kind of explore more about AI and automation.

Loraine Lawson
Sure. And you got a chance this week to talk to the digital head of digital at Bank of America, correct?

Bianca Chan
Yes, David Tyree was the the guest for our five questions with, and we spoke a lot about, you know, his underlying strategy, and also what’s to come from the bank and kind of how they, how they measure the success of their automation. So one of the first points he brought up was, was, with every sort of decision, every product that is made, and developed, there’s always this balance of IQ and EQ, he said, the IQ is, is like the automation part of things, you know, let me do this, go do that for me, you know, send this person this much money. And Funny enough, he said, that’s the boring side of the operation. The other side is EQ, of course, and that relates to customer experience and, you know, sentiment analysis, consumer behavior. So sort of what you’re talking about, actually with the, with the AI and automation in terms of personalization, but digging into the IQ side of things, because of course, we are bank automation news. You know, David said it wasn’t so much about the number of automations that you have in place. It’s more, it’s more about how often those automations are being used by customers. And that’s really where you can make your automation dollars count. to two of the most highly used automated technologies or processes that Bank of America will be Zell and Erica, which is Erica is the virtual assistant backed by AI. So more of this kind of like AI and automation, and today is a weekly wrap. But um, so Bank of America processes one third of the entire volume going through the Zell network. So zone network is made up of more than 5000 banks. And why does that matter? Because he said, 75% of people that use Zell don’t write checks anymore. And that represents huge savings for Bank of that size. So mobile check deposit to for those who do write checks, is another automation that is really helping Bank of America’s bottom lines. He said it’s a 10th of the cost to one process via the mobile app. Versus versus processing checks the traditional way, which is pretty insane. When you think about, if you think about it, if you’ve ever used the technology before to to deposit a check on your mobile app, it’s quite amazing. And since I’ve been doing it, you know, for years, I haven’t gone into a branch to, to do that that process. And so the other most height, so the most highly use automated technology at Bank of America, is Erica, not surprising looking at the numbers that we report on every quarter. But what’s interesting in that what I didn’t know was the bank actually uses the AI platform internally to speed software development, because the tech crosses all business lines, different different departments, all tech stacks, and systems everything. So instead of needing to integrate these siloed systems, Erica does it for them. So more on more on this front of AI and automation. And that has actually helped them to speed up their product development releases to every every month, as opposed to every quarter. So just helps the bank kind of internally operate at a much faster clip, while also providing you know, a better and speedier and more cost efficient, I guess, customer experience.

Loraine Lawson
Interesting. I actually talked to Finastra. Today, they just released a survey that we’ll be talking about, but of 700 commercial and business banks, and one of the things they talked about was the need for that integration across the enterprise, but also the need to integrate with your business partners. So I thought that was interesting, and how automation can help with that.

Bianca Chan
Yeah, you know what, that’s actually a kind of a coincidence that you say that because yesterday, we wrote a story about plaid and, obviously plaid, a data aggregator, but they’ve just launched this new capability that incorporates income verification between so it’s easy for consumers to upload or authorize their payroll provider to provide this information to plan. And then plaid then passes along that structured data and documents onto financial institutions. So more in this kind of open banking vein, I guess, of integrating not just internally but with your partners, like you mentioned. So that’s we’re definitely seeing some some themes here some common themes today. And what do you have on the docket for next week?

Loraine Lawson
Well, I’ll have more from the UiPath AI summit. There talked about finance, financial sector in particular, today, so I’ll be reporting on that. And I believe there’s an article coming up on how Bank of America we use automation to personalize the mobile customer experience, as well as a piece on bookkeeping and accounting automation startup that scored $13.5 million.

Bianca Chan
Very nice. And we’ll also be highlighting a couple of really interesting demos from some automation focus startups in our current Discovery Program. So keep your eyes peeled for that as well. Thank you so much, Laredo for joining us. And thanks to all of our listeners watchers, for joining us on the weekly wrap on the buzz. For more podcast content, check out bank automation news.com and search the buzz from Bank automation news on iTunes and Spotify. Thanks very much.