Deeply Embedding AI Into Financial Services Is Key to Achieving Sustainable Growth, Says Publicis Sapient

One of AI’s main strengths is its ability to efficiently handle large amounts of data and create valuable insights to enable faster, more accurate, and more personable client experiences. This application is perfect for the financial services industry, particularly in the fields of wealth management and banking, given the need to extract and extrapolate numerous data points, as well as identify and take advantage of trends that might not be readily apparent.

While the current level of generative AI appears impressive to the average person, the financial services industry has yet to harness its capabilities to the fullest. Many companies are talking about AI, but few are implementing it in a fundamental, enterprise-wide way - with concrete use cases. Centralizing and structuring all data sources--numerical and internal-- is essential for unleashing the full power of generative AI.

In 2024, the AI industry is poised to shift from the training of large language models to their widespread deployment and use, significantly increasing inferencing workloads, which involve generating outputs like ChatGPT responses. This surge is anticipated as AI solutions developed in 2023 reach the market. The demand for inferencing is expected to double that of training by mid-decade, driving an urgent need for enhanced computing power and infrastructure development to support the growing use of generative AI technologies.

Publicis Sapient, a digital transformation leader in the financial services space, believes that Gen AI will have a much wider and more beneficial impact on the financial services industry if it is applied foundationally within the business. This means that AI is not just window dressing or on the periphery, but rather, is integrated into the business’ DNA and influences its core operations.

According to David Donovan, financial services practice leader at Publicis Sapient, most of the industry conversations about generative AI in financial services remain just high-level talk and theory, while practice and execution are often lagging far behind.

Donovan says Publicis Sapient is challenging that by putting fingers to keyboards to create its own AI solutions that deliver tangible results to the financial services industry, where the firm works with some of the world’s leading companies in the wealth management and banking sectors. Through its partnerships with major large language models (LLMs), Publicis Sapient has access to these extensive libraries, resulting in more powerful AI tools.

“Many companies are writing whitepapers, while we write code,” Donovan says. “We are not confined to just theorizing about AI – we are actually programming it. From a client’s perspective, many of them want solutions that address their pain points and create benefits for their business. This is why we are constantly investing in minimum viable products, testing them with our engineers, and sharing them with our clients, while continually refining them to meet their needs.”

One of the key benefits of Publicis Sapient’s AI approach is integrating non-numerical, non-traditional data for financial services clients. For example, news articles, customer feedback, Fed reports, and sentiment analysis on social media are all important parts of the data infrastructure. When correctly used, this allows financial services companies to improve their risk prediction, fraud detection, and credit decisions, amongst other things.

One specific use case of how Publicis Sapient has harnessed generative AI is the Wealth Management Accelerator (WMX), which assists wealth advisors in extracting valuable insights from vast amounts of data scattered across multiple systems. WMX creates a unified conversational interface that allows advisors to query documents and client data using natural language. It analyzes data from multiple sources and past behavior to provide actionable insights for advisors, which will lead to more satisfaction for their clients.

Donovan and many of the Publicis Sapient financial services practice are former traders themselves, giving them an understanding of how the industry works and how technology can be leveraged to create an edge, and deliver outsized returns for clients.

“Having spent many years in the industry, we know what works and what doesn’t. We create our own intellectual property, and we use it as well; we eat our own dog food. This gives our clients confidence, as we are investing our own money into the initiatives that we offer them,” Donovan says.

According to Donovan, once AI has been integrated on a foundational level within the financial services industry, it will serve to level the playing field, making business decisions in a fraction second that are unclouded by human judgment.

For example, AI allows banks to make the right lending decisions, getting people the right credit for them, and reducing the risk of non-payment and default. This has a positive effect on the economic cycle, as shown by multiple economic crises triggered by debt being abused. By avoiding these crises, economic growth will become more sustainable and less susceptible to crashes.

“I believe that, because of AI, credit will be used in a much smarter way. Utilizing the vast amounts of available data, AI can easily determine what a borrower can afford and cannot afford. What’s more, the financial services industry, and regulators, have come a long way on regulation and compliance, so the chances of triggering the crises we’ve seen in the past are low.”

Donovan also notes that most of the main growth drivers of the US stock market are companies that are involved in AI, whether on the software or hardware side. And, unlike the dot-com bubble that was fuelled by hype and speculation before finally bursting in the early 2000s, Donovan says the major AI stocks are backed by actual revenue. This means that the growth, caused by the rising demand for computing power, is genuine.

“In the AI Age, computing power is going to be the equivalent of the steam engine during the Industrial Revolution,” Donovan says. “AI will power the US and the global economy and weed out waste, making the markets operate more efficiently and sustainably. Publicis Sapient is spearheading a more foundational implementation of AI because how AI is being used today is just party tricks compared to its full capability when integrated at an enterprise level. If you’re impressed now, just wait.”