Banking Sector Receives Strong Govt Support To Scale AI

By Nur Athirah Mohd Shaharuddin

SINGAPORE, Aug 19 (Bernama) -- Malaysia’s banking sector is receiving strong government support and encouragement to scale artificial intelligence (AI) adoption within the industry.

Bank Simpanan Nasional chief information officer Lee Li Foon said although the sector’s adoption of AI is in its early stage, there has been significant collaboration between industry players and the government to learn from one another.

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“Our government is spearheading the National Artificial Intelligence Roadmap (AI Roadmap) which I believe provides us with a significant opportunity to strengthen our AI guidelines.

“We will be able to see what works, what is toxic, what is hallucination, and what is actual factuality,” she told Bernama at the International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) Think 2024 conference held on Aug 14-15, 2024.

Themed "Scaling AI for Business to Accelerate Innovation and Productivity", the conference delved into how AI will unlock ASEAN’s economic potential.

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Bank Islam Malaysia Bhd director of digital transformation Shahariz Abdul Aziz, who also attended the event, noted that one of the challenges facing the financial services industry is data accuracy.

He explained that in this industry, data needs to be 100 per cent accurate as it involves dealing with customers.

“So essentially, what I see as the biggest opportunity is in the back office (administrative work), mainly in terms of making processes more efficient and automated. Since we are dealing with so much information, things are constantly changing, and customer expectations are high.

“One great use case is having sales staff use AI to equip themselves with all the knowledge they need to deal with customers more effectively,” he said, adding that this would help customer service work more efficiently and enable meaningful conversations with clients.

Shahariz also mentioned that Bank Islam is currently focusing on the essential aggregation of information for its corporate division.

He noted that previously, the bank evaluated a company using available public information and data gathered from the corporate entity to prepare a presentation proposal to the credit committee and the board for approval, a process that usually took almost a month.

“So essentially, we utilise AI to pull all this information together, synthesise it, cut out all the things that are fake or false news, and only then are we able to present it in a manner that allows us to move the proposal forward.

“The expectation is that AI will reduce the time taken from three or four weeks to just a couple of hours. From there, we will be able to operate more effectively and also increase our volume,” he added.

-- BERNAMA