Financial Services: creating more value with Artificial Intelligence

Whitin the ABI Funding & Market Capitals event held in Milan on October 3rd, Alessandro Viviani, Partner and founder of Parva Consulting has been the protagonist of the workshop “Artificial Intelligence: applicable solutions to increase efficiency and reduce risks” in collaboration with Expert System, the Italian company that has patented Cogito®, the AI software for text analytics and cognitive computing that reads, understands and replies.

We asked Viviani to introduce us to what is announced as the revolution of the Finance world.

Why does a company need Artificial Intelligence to create more value today?

Viviani: The amount of information generated is too large to be managed exclusively by people. And especially the speed required in the analysis and response of the information flow is too high to be managed by human. The AI allows to manage, analyze and provide adequate feedback to extremely high information volumes. A component of “imperfection” i terms of quality remains, but it’s a fact that requires continuous monitoring of results and refinement of solutions.

It’s time for technology?

Viviani: Technological innovation is the theme of the moment, but without a knowledge and a real analysis of the functional areas of a company, it remains a resource difficult to apply at maximum efficiency. Consulting today has a more specific and essential task than ever: understanding which are the main impact areas where this kind of technology have to be applied to bring added value.

What kind of solution does Parva propose to companies in the Financial Services industry?

Viviani: Cogito is a Natural Language Understanding solution. In Financial Services, the flow of unstructured information (written in plain text) is extremely relevant (eg. communications from customers, documents from issuers, reports from analysts) and the pressure to contain costs (and the number of resources) is extremely strong . In this sense, this kind of solution can “lighten” an institution from the constraints of management volumes / times and from the limits of the available resources  to carry out analyzes, to analyze and to direct customer communications. Cogito can have a very strong impact on these cases: especially when it is used to “structure” unstructured and then to feed RPA systems (that need structured and predefined inputs to work).

What does Cogito concretely revolutionizes? Can we give an example within a bank?

Viviani: Cogito has a strong impact on the analysis and management of inbound communications, for example: reading the communication by e-mail – understanding the request – verifying is the necessary documentation is attached – addressing the right persons of the team with explanation of the actions to be performed and , if interfaced with a robotics system, to perform consistent actions for the requests. We have also identified extremely relevant areas of benefit both in the Operations and in the Trading and Credit world: the benefits consist both in executing the same activities performed today by people, freeing up precious resources, up to focus on other activities with greater added value, both to be able to cover / analyze larger volumes than today without increasing the team.

Why is this a Business and HR theme?

Viviani: Artificial Intelligence is often experienced as a matter of IT and Systems: the key is instead to know how and where to apply these technologies: so this is a theme of Business and HR. Cogito enables clients not only to make processes more effective and efficient, but also to rethink them at the base, also reviewing the service  and the feedback provided to end customers. Implementing this kind of solution allows to focus the internal resources on activities with greater added value and, at the same time, requires a strengthening of the abilities of analysis and design of the processes and control of the results, in order to activate a process of continuous improvement .

 About Cogito

Patented, award-winning and multilingual, Cogito® is the software of the Italian company Expert System for text analytics and the cognitive computing that reads, understands and replies.  It supports companies to make better decisions at the speed of today’s technologies with the scalability to manage large data stores.

How Cogito works

Cogito is an AI software that reads, interprets and, above all, disambiguates data and information. It is a concrete tool able to improve the performance of companies where the ability to process data and information more quickly increases efficiency and reduces risks. To understand the value it can bring, let’s imagine the advantage of a software that automatically opens, reads, interprets and distributes the emails delivered to a bank, activating the required procedure; or reading, analyzing and reporting the most significant documents in the Trading field. Above all, Cogito allows companies to focus on the management of the most exceptional and value-added activities.

The cognitive computing potential of Cogito is based on artificial intelligence algorithms that simulate the human ability to read and understand language in depth. Cogito is based on an extensive and in-depth representation of knowledge, immediately available. The center of Cogito’s knowledge is the Sensigrafo: a language map with a very rich semantic network including ontologies and millions of definitions and relations between concepts.