Research activities - Visions and views SMN
Research activities - Visions and views
Mature bank customers have high expectations
-What we want is tailored bank services to customer’s need.
Astrid Undheim, Executive Director at SpareBank1 SMN
Where is Norwegian AI research heading?
Norwegian bank customers are digitally mature with high expectations in terms of access to bank services, convenience, and speed. Norwegian banks have invested heavily in new digital channels and tools and are today technologically advanced.
Use of data in the finance sector, including utilizing AI and ML, will increasingly be one of the key components for keeping up with the expectations from customers – including delivering faster service and better customer support. In practice this means getting a loan approval faster, getting a better overview of your personal economy, more relevant product offers from your bank, and in general having a banking service more tailored to you needs and preferences.
At the same time, the regulatory environment facing Norwegian and European banks, including anti-money laundering and fraud detection, put demands on the use of digital technology. The complexity of these tasks, and the increased expectations from customers and regulators, means that these tasks can no longer be solved efficiently without more advanced data analysis. Reacting to transactions in real-time, finding patterns in transactions, and identifying abnormal activity will be mandatory activities. Systems that learn and that are able to detect and react to new and unseen situations from higher transaction volumes and more complex customer relationships, demands AI.
-Customer expectations: faster loan approvals, better overview of personal economy, relevant product offers, a banking service more tailored.
How can research facilitate innovation in your opinion?
A strong Norwegian AI Research community is important to Norwegian banks to stay competitive, both in the customer and the regulatory dimension. Building this type of competence in Norway is important both for the competitiveness of Norwegian industry, but also because some of the problems are unique to Norway, including problems requiring Norwegian language understanding and problems requiring understanding of Norwegian laws and regulations.
Looking forward, what is success for NorwAI?
Training students and researchers in industry problems will increase innovation pace in Norwegian industry and makes the studies more relevant and hopefully more interesting. A win-win!
Innovation in the AI space will happen through close collaboration between research and industry. The NorwAI SFI ambitions to strengthen some of the key success factors to accelerate innovation will be fundamental, including
- A low barrier for introducing industry problems to students and researchers
- A world-class research community, and
- A curious industry looking for innovative solutions and with a willingness to put results into practical use.
AI is a research field where the path from research to innovation is becoming shorter, which calls for even closer collaboration between research and industry.