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Union Bank of the Philippines (UnionBank) and US-based data and artificial intelligence (AI) services provider TripleBlind recently held a webinar on collaborating with AI tools in financial service. The Bank’s Chief Data and AI Officer Dr. David Hardoon, and Head of AI Center of Excellence Dr. Adrienne Heinrich, discussed the importance of customer centricity and collaboration in providing data and AI- driven solutions to customers. Dr. Hardoon presented customer centricity as a very important component of banking and finance, as this mindset will enable banks and other financial solutions providers to create products and services that are more personalized and address customers’ unique needs.

"Everything that we do—when we go buy a car, when dealing with insurance or healthcare, thinking of our future house—ultimately is situated and substantiated on our finances. So, how do we go about truly personalizing and accommodating one's need? It's important to really have that centricity" Dr. Hardoon stressed. He added that true breakthroughs in terms of solutions can be achieved through collaboration with players in other sectors, as doing so will bring in a vast amount of outsider expertise into the co-creation process. "Customer centricity has to be done through collaboration, and that naturally leads to the multi-sectorial approach, providing better, more specific products, better solutions" Dr. Hardoon said.

"For us at UnionBank, it's very important to put the customer at the center, and therefore, we seek to develop customer-centric AI solutions. Besides looking at AI solutions for banking-specific features, we're also looking at innovative solutions beyond banking" mentioned Dr. Heinrich. She likewise noted that solutions providers should consider value-adds for clients to enable them to have customer relationships in a more holistic way. This would assist clients in their areas of interest or in what they want or need to spend money for.

"We can actually see that this is really a customer need when looking at major topics that come up in personal finance forums on the web. We can see that less than 20 percent of the conversations actually mention banking products or services" Dr. Heinrich emphasized.

UnionBank has been continuously exploring partnerships with external players in the industry or academia to provide more value for its customers. This, Dr. Heinrich said, will enable the Bank to be fast with innovative advances. She then cited AI use cases in healthcare as an example, with a hypothetical use case where a bank can get access to a large pool of data of patients with certain chronic diseases.

According to Dr. Heinrich, "By running machine learning models on this data, we can give financial advice for the coming months and years to be able to cover the cost for the treatments and have patients select their preferred life-enhancing products or services accordingly. And we can also easily enhance the data set with our own data of the customer, and that can be shared back to the care provider, if the patient agrees."

There really are a lot of possibilities collaborating with AI tools in financial services.

Staying Customer Centric: Lessons from UnionBank Data Science, AI experts

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Tag : Artificial Intelligence, corporations, customer, Philippines, technology, Unionbank,

Last October 20, Union Bank of the Philippines (UnionBank) held the fifth installment of its E-TalkTales series wherein Head of Transaction Banking Mon Duarte discussed the Bank’s various transaction banking solutions, particularly The Portal, its all-digital banking platform for corporate clients.

Duarte began the discussion by differentiating UnionBank’s Transaction Banking solutions, which he defined as simply offering customized solutions to help digitize our corporate clients. Traditional transaction banking helps manage flow of funds by facilitating collections and payments, over-the-counter check deposits, to the provision of armored car services for high cash transaction situations, among others.

The main focus of Duarte's discussion was UnionBank's The Portal, its digital banking platform specially designed for corporate clients. Offering a host of solutions that include bills payments, payroll, fund transfers, check writing services, merchant payment gateway systems, and credit facilities, The Portal provides corporations with all their essential banking needs in a single platform.

Knowing that each corporate entity has needs and priorities that are uniquely theirs, UnionBank designed The Portal in a way that allows it to provide utmost flexibility to clients, making it the preferred platform for those who don't want the one-size-fits-all approach of most competitors when it comes to the corporate banking solutions they offer.

Part of the flexibility offered by The Portal comes by way of various customization options available to clients. Depending on the current needs of their organization, clients can choose only the solutions that they want to avail of at the moment, and then adjust later on. To make it easier, the Bank created a number of packaged solutions based on what it thinks would make sense for clients, which they can avail of anytime via The Portal website.

Another key feature of The Portal in terms of flexibility is the possible configurations for transaction approvals. With this feature, corporates will be able to establish a specific maker-checker process for each transaction made by their team members. This will give them free control over who can make which transaction, as well as the maximum amount for each transaction depending on who makes it, among others.

With The Portal, UnionBank aims to make transaction banking as seamless for users as possible, and the Bank wants to make this very clear right from the moment a client starts using the platform—the onboarding process.

Onboarding is typically one of the most stressful phases of using a new platform for many corporates, since it involves learning a new set of interfaces and processes. This phase can take a few days or weeks or even a few months to finish. With The Portal, however, UnionBank also digitized the onboarding processes so that clients can get into the platform in less than a day, usually within a few minutes, with no further training needed.

These are only a few innovative features of The Portal. As the Bank continues its digital transformation journey, more services will become available in the coming months.

The Portal is not based on any third-party digital framework. Instead, it was built from the ground up. In creating The Portal, UnionBank was guided by the principle of having a simple integrated platform in order to ensure the best user experience for customers. For the Bank, providing superior transaction banking experiences to users is a top priority, and The Portal is the perfect representation of what it believes transaction banking should be.