Three nascent concepts that may have an impact in years to come

1. PAYMENTS DATA THAT TALKS BACK

Virtual assistants were helping banking customers long before anyone had heard of OpenAI. Gen-AI may usher in a new generation of these tools, allowing users to have more personalised, conversational interactions.

On the one hand, this means better customer service. On the other, it could mean enabling customers to get more insights out of their payments data—and it’s arguably this that would be the more profound shift. Being able to query their data via a natural language chatbot would mean customers wouldn’t have to know how to use data manipulation tools, or limit themselves to an app’s pre-set data analysis features.

2. CHAT-BASED COMMERCE EVOLVES

Not only are banks experimenting with AI personalization to help people manage their money, retailers are also testing out ways to help consumers spend it. German shopping platform Zalando announced plans to integrate ChatGPT so users could ask questions such as, “What should I wear to a friend’s wedding in Greece?” The chatbot would then give shoppable recommendations based on factors such as the weather.
Some analysts imagine that, in the future, users may be able to give natural language prompts that automatically fill whole shopping baskets with relevant goods. Perhaps you would type: “I am planning a dinner for four adults, and we want to eat spaghetti bolognese.” Push a button, and there are your ingredients plus a recipe. Think of it as a new form of retail interface.

3. BRINGING THE (SYNTHETIC) FIGHT TO FRAUD

There’s a normal way to behave in a shop. Perhaps you walk through the front door, browse the products, maybe experience a moment of indecision, then make a payment. Online it’s no different. “There are certain characteristics that we can identify as harmless and likely to have been authorised by the individual,” says David Britton, Vice President of Strategy, Global Identity and Fraud at Experian, which uses AI to detect fraud on behalf of its retail or banking clients. It’s therefore potentially significant when standard patterns aren’t followed.
“Perhaps they don’t come through the front door, they enter the store through the equivalent of a side window,” says Britton. “And then instead of doing some shopping and putting some things in their cart and taking things out of a cart, they go right to the most expensive item, grab three of them and then go right to the checkout.”

INTO THE FUTURE...

As AI excitement grips the fintech world, there are warnings that the technology needs to be deployed in a way that’s transparent about what it is and how it works.