Chatbots are increasingly being utilized by financial institutions. But the path to full adoption is filled with numerous challenges, according to industry leaders.
The adoption and exploration of generative artificial intelligence (genAI) is becoming ubiquitous in finance. According to a Forrester report, 58 percent of global business and technology professionals at financial services companies have implemented genAI-enabled use cases. And within genAI, a separate KPMG survey noted that chatbots have been named as the most popular use case.
Still, there are concerns about the deployment of chatbots for client use, industry leaders said during a panel at the Digital Visionaries Symposium attended by finews.asia. This is due to issues such as the presentation of false or misleading information as fact, also known as hallucinations.
«Imagine if a client asks, let's say DBS GPT which is currently what we use internally, a question about what the DBS share [price] going to be tomorrow,» said Lareina Wang, head of digital innovation, DBS. «And then the bot grabs some information and comes up with something that's seemingly very convincing but is completely ungrounded. Next day that will be disastrous.»
Regulatory Challenges
Other than client risks, there are also regulatory challenges in the adoption of chatbots with different markets sometimes containing vastly different rules.
«For example, one regulator requires a human to look at any correspondence that goes to a client,» shared David Friedland, regional head & managing director, Interactive Brokers Group. «So if someone sends in a question, you can have a bot create a very simple answer but a human still has to look at it. In other places, it's perfectly okay to just send it out.»
GenAI Solutions
Nonetheless, financial firms cannot be too risk-averse as they could end up being left behind as overly late adopters. At DBS, it currently has over 100 genAI-related solutions developed with 15 that are live. The solutions are all for internal usage, supporting functions such as coding for IT staff or copywriting for marketing.
On balancing rapid adoption with risk management, Friedland shared a quote by John Wooden, a renowned basketball coach from UCLA, as a word of advice.
«Be quick, but don’t hurry,» he said.
