Digitizing Banking For The Future of Client Lifecycle Management

An abundance of data, cloud usage and increased algorithms around machine learning make CLM an area that’s ready for considerable technological disruption. With a dedicated innovation role, the Fenergo R&D team have been looking closely at innovation in the financial services sector.

The Big Five Sector Disruptors

1.    Natural Language Processing

Natural language processing gives us the opportunity to improve the way we extract information from documents. Can we improve the way we monitor proof of identity? Can we use natural language generation to have more personalized documentation? This would give us the opportunity to reduce the amount of duplicate documents we send and ask clients for, improving customer service levels and reducing unnecessary work.

2.    Robotics

Robotics is an opportunity to address the challenge in data and system integration. It can help us integrate different data repositories and pull the data into a core system like Fenergo more easily. There’s potential for system integration and cross system automation moving towards a true API-driven strategy over time.

3.    Identity and Verification

Financial Services are behind the crowd with ID & V. People increasingly want the sort of identification process they’re used to seeing in the retail world. Why shouldn’t we be using smartphones to cross-check facial recognition or other biometrics with proof of identity within the commercial corporate space?

4.    Machine Learning

Machine learning gives us hope with the challenge of false positives in AML. Analyzing the large volume of alerts and cross-checking it with the data we have at Fenergo provides us with a way of understanding whether future alerts are valid or not. We’d like to think the system can learn to reduce the number of alerts coming through over time.

5.    Blockchain

Blockchain is an area of technology that’s rife with hype and hope. But there are potential applications, for instance within KYC. Instead of the current situation where customers provide duplicated information to multiple institutions, blockchain could work as a solution that allows us to share permission information across different institutions. Blockchain’s immutability of records also makes it an attractive prospect to demonstrate compliance towards customer data.

Financial Services. An Evolving Sector

Compared to five years ago, financial institutions have evolved their expectations around technology. Nowadays, we see the cloud as a core part of most financial institutions; even institutions who are unable to run cloud production systems because of their data restrictions request cloud for non-production systems. Compare this to five years ago when cloud was not a priority and you can see how far the industry has moved on.

In addition to cloud technology, the importance of integration and its effect on the user experience has become a key priority. Financial institutions want to have open integration standards – they have to be able to integrate with other systems, potentially NDM systems and client repositories. Although user experience was deprioritized in the past, demand has shifted, and people now want rich interaction and functionality from a system.

Collaborating For A Successful Future

Fenergo’s CTO forum is comprised of technologists from across our client base. As well as allowing our clients to interact and share ideas with one another, it allows us to validate our roadmap from a technology perspective. Being able to review and evaluate our innovation streams within the forum helps us drill down into the nuts and bolts of our developments. The value of the group is in the way the clients work together in the forum – some embrace the new technology, others prefer a wait and see approach, but for us, their perspective and experience are invaluable in the development of our plans.