83% Indian Financial Organisations Say AI Enhances Customer Experience, Finds Study

In the post-Covid period, artificial intelligence (AĪ) has become an integral part of the financial service sector and 83 per cent of Indian financial organisations believe that AI helps in enhancing their customer experience, finds a recent report published by the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce & Industry (FICCI) in collaboration with PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC), professional services network. The report namely “Uncovering the ground truth: AI in Indian financial services” released in February, analyses the importance and the growing impact of AI in the Indian financial sector.  

The report finds that more than 55 per cent of the financial organisations strongly agree that AI will give them a competitive edge over their peers. More than half the respondents say that they have a single unified data repository and almost 40 per cent have an enterprise-wide data governance framework. To ensure better safety and security, 65 per cent of the respondents have deployed fraud detection AI engines, making it the second most common use case in the FS industry. Be it the insurance companies or the non-banking financial companies, AI has been widely deployed by most of the financial sectors.  

The report finds that even an Indian firm has developed a natural language processing (NLP) based sentiment analysis tool to gather the news and social sentiment from text to  be used as an input while taking investment or trading-related decisions. 

“Financial institutions in India are using AI-powered solutions to unlock revenue growth opportunities, minimise operating expenses, and automate manually intensive processes. Many of the routine activities have already been entrusted to machines. Financial firms are also using artificial intelligence (AI) to improve security and transparency in systems for payments fraud detection and prevention, as well as for identity verification to meet regulatory requirements associated with Anti-Money Laundering (AML) and Know Your Customer (KYC),” says Rashesh Shah, Past President, FICCI, and Chair, FICCI Financial Sector Council. 

The report finds that most of the financial organisations implement AI in five major services that include chat automation, fraud detection AI virtual assistant customer profiling and classification customer journey personalisation. Banking is one of the leading financial sectors in implementing and adopting all emerging AI use cases across the globe as well as in the Indian context. “AI applications are estimated to help banks make potential cost savings worth USD 447 billion by 2023,” states the report.