ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
POWER&RESPONSIBILITY Scotiabank couldn’t have intervened to help millions of families at risk of financial distress during the pandemic without AI. But it’s super-conscious of ethical hazard, which is why it’s put in place human processes to protect the bank’s integrity, says Phil Thomas, Executive VP of Customer Insights, Data & Analytics at Scotiabank Canada
In November of last year, Scotiabank introduced a new Global AI platform to better meet its customers’ needs in a world where those needs were rapidly changing. At the time, it said the pandemic had ‘reinforced the importance of delivering customised financial advice that speaks to our customers' unique business and household situations'. It undoubtedly gave the bank better insight on the enormous amount of transactional and other data that it holds on customers to help them manage their finances better. And the results have been impressive: it enabled the bank to reach out to two million customers, which AI had identified as being the most financially vulnerable to COVID-19, allowing the bank to offer them support and solutions before they suffered any potentially long-lasting, catastrophic impacts. It was clearly an example of artificial intelligence being used to good effect. But, at the same time, there are a number of www.fintechf.com
growing anxieties surrounding the ethical use of AI, as numerous recent use cases have demonstrated. From a discriminatory Microsoft Chatbot, to a seemingly sexist Goldman Sachs’ Apple Card credit line algorithm, there has been evidence of unintended bias creeping into the AI systems companies and businesses have been using to improve the service they provide to their customers. The growing unease has led to calls for these models to be regulated and monitored, not only to protect individuals and groups, but also to ensure the technology doesn’t end up embarrassing and damaging the organisation behind it. Phil Thomas, the executive vice president of customer insights, data and analytics at Scotiabank Canada, is the man who has to face those ethical questions every day. The bank, which operates across Canada and Latin America, had been building a model for its Global AI platform based on customer value when the pandemic hit. With the advent of COVID, it pivoted that model to one based on customer vulnerability.
“We’ve been exploring the use of AI in our retail businesses, both in Canada and internationally, as well as our capital markets business,” says Thomas. “But the use of machine learning and AI has been critical for us through the COVID period. “We’ve been leveraging the data and the machine learning techniques to identify our most vulnerable customers, and then building proactive outreach programmes for these customers, so that our traditional channels, branches, or call centres, etc, have leads. That way they know the customer and their financial situation, and they’re able to come up with relevant solutions, based on the predictions generated by the AI. “We used this vulnerability model to reach out to about two million customers who were at risk of being financially impacted by COVID. We were able to link those to a financial solution, whether it was a deferral or re-amortising or refinancing loans, to be able to make it more affordable for our customers to bank with us.” Issue 19 | TheFintechMagazine
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