The Impact of Deep Tech on BFSI: Deepak Sharma, President and CDO, Kotak Mahindra Bank

Deep Tech, which basically consists of a set of technologies such as artificial intelligence, robotics, blockchain, quantum computing, and so on, has a predominant role to play in the Banking and Financial Services sector. Deepak Sharma, president and Chief Digital Officer, Kotak Mahindra Bank, revealed percipient details on the role played by deep technologies in the financial services industry.

“From a financial service standpoint, I think there are three or four things that have got accelerated because of the advent of mobile,” said Deepak Sharma at the DataQuest virtual roundtable - Deep Tech in India and the Road Ahead. “BFSI is a risk-averse industry, and with the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic the magnitude of risk has increased. There are now financial, security, fraud-related, operational, and reputational risks,” added Sharma while explaining how the BFSI industry was looking at solving these problems through Deep Tech.

“For instance, one of the areas that we are using Deep Tech is with loan moratorium. It is important for us to identify customers who have means to pay but not the intent to pay versus those who have the intent to pay but have no means to pay. We cannot manually identify this on the basis of the profile, income level or the industry. Therefore we had to use machine learning algorithm to do that,” he said. ML algorithms can help the industry assess SMEs, market-related risks, loan paying capacity of the industry, and customer segments to name a few.

Another area wherein BFSI in increasingly using Deep Tech is in the cyber security area “Deep tech is capable of understanding the risk which could be both at the customer’s end and at our data center, and also analyses our whole ecosystem peripheral risk. Monitoring threat perception can be done through Deep Tech,” stated Sharma.

Deep Tech is also being used to deliver a good customer experience. “Since the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted the customer service industry to a large extent, conversational artificial intelligence that had actually become intelligent rather than just FAQs had to come into play. In the case of BFSI, I would call it augmented intelligence rather than AI,” added Sharma.

Furthermore, Sharma said, that video conferencing will play a more important role going forward. “Video-based KYC platforms and OCR extraction will increasingly be used going forward,” said Sharma in conclusion.