By Michael Cullum, Vice President of Engineering, Bud Financial
Generative AI (genAI) is a powerful tool that is transforming the financial industry and empowering financial services professionals. It makes banks more data-driven and insightful, enhancing decision-making; providing deeper insights; and achieve greater agility, personalized customer service and automation. The quality of transactional data is central to this transformation, providing invaluable insights into customer behavior and giving professionals a sense of control.
Banks are increasingly adopting genAI to improve operations, from cost classification and transaction monitoring to enhanced risk decisions and predictive customer service. Key to these benefits is the enrichment of transaction data. This process involves enhancing raw transaction data with contextual information, including merchant identification, transaction location, payment processor details, and expense categories. Rich data allows banks to build a comprehensive picture of customer behavior, enabling personalized services and accurate risk assessment.
The cornerstone of GenAI’s effectiveness lies in the quality of the bank’s data, with customer transactions being its most valuable asset. Transaction data provides deep insights into customer behavior and market dynamics that, when analyzed at scale, can deliver significant benefits across a bank’s value chain. From refining risk decisions to designing innovative propositions and offering predictable customer service, the potential applications are vast.
In the banking context, the main focus of genAI conversations is on large language models (LLM), which are great for working with textual information, but are most effective when working with natural language. This is a challenge for banks because a lot of data needs to be processed for genAI to be useful. For transactions, this means adding metrics that can be described in natural language and with as much detail as possible to ensure that all possible patterns and matches are found.
“Effective use of GenAI depends on the breadth, depth and quality of a bank’s data, and the most valuable data a bank possesses is customer transactions,” said Richard Berkley, PA Consulting.
Bud Financial (Bud) helps banks and financial institutions provide that context to their customers, alerting them to how they can improve their decisions. At the same time, banks can use this data to improve their decisions around areas such as credit availability and application processes. Bud specializes in enriching customer transaction data by providing customer context that makes it useful across the enterprise, including as an implementation of genAI applications, enabling banks and financial institutions to gain deeper insights into customer behavior, improve risk assessment and deliver personalized services: .
The Bud platform processes massive amounts of real-time data to deliver actionable insights that improve customer engagement and operational efficiency. Bud uses advanced technologies such as DataStax Astra DB to seamlessly manage and scale their data operations, ensuring high performance and reliability. Astra DB’s scalability and performance enable Bud to process hundreds of thousands of transactions per second, providing real-time insights and services.
GenAI is not only transforming financial services; it also inspires banks to use the full potential of their transaction data. Investing in advanced data enrichment and artificial intelligence models allows banks to gain deeper insights, improve customer service and drive innovation. As the financial services industry continues to evolve, financial professionals need to stay current and informed about the role genAI will play in shaping the future of banking, thereby keeping them inspired and engaged.
To learn more about genAI in financial services, read the new report, How to use GenAI to multiply customer insights from transactional data?, From Bud and PA Consulting, with contributions from DataStax, Google Cloud and Zup Innovation. The report explores the revolutionary potential of genAI in the financial services industry, highlighting the emergence of the “smart bank” and the shift to an “AI-first” mindset, and detailing how genAI will drive transformative changes in strategic and operational decision-making processes in banks. .
About Michael Cullum
DataStax:
Michael Cullum is VP of Engineering and Data at Bud, a London-based fintech company that produces a platform used by leading global banks and fintechs to harness the potential value and power of operational data to gain 360-degree customer understanding and actionable to provide insights.