The interplay between humans and machines is critical in the financial services (FS) organisations’ quest to keeping pace with customer expectations. Customers expect the same ease, speed and intuition from providers that they have become accustomed to in other areas of their lives. These expectations can be basic, such as not waiting for weeks for loan approvals, or more complex, and provide opportunities for providers to stand out in the market.
People, not systems, drive innovation and help organisations realise their full potential. PwC’s report, Banking and capital markets trends 2019: Why banking and capital markets transformation is all about people, indicates that millennials working in FinTech have drawn on their personal experiences – such as difficulties in saving enough for a deposit on a home or attracting funding for new business ideas with little or no credit record – to develop new banking capabilities that include tracking spending and analysis apps to help individuals reach specific financial goals.
The need to train artificial intelligence (AI) to understand and respond to human interactions and nuanced demands is going to make this ability to relate to real lives ever more important. And as more operations become automated, the innately human capabilities that cannot be replicated by machines, such as creativity, empathy and leadership, will become a differentiator.
For instance, the growing importance of delivering financial wellness as a key customer outcome and strategic goal underlines the value of empathy. Further need for human touch would include judging how technology can be deployed in the best interests of customers and wider society.
The way people act
“Because financial services providers are under extreme scrutiny and extensive compliance requirements, they find themselves having to focus on both the financial part of the business and conduct, as well as the way their people act,” says Barry Vorster, Lead: HR Technology and Culture at PwC.
“From a human point of view, regulation is there to help organisations institute frameworks and ways of working through which compliance is embedded, where people have a deep appreciation for why this is important, not just for the sake of complying, but to do it because it is important in terms of the trust the institution has within the country and the community,”
The human-machine interplay will go a long way towards giving financial services organisations the ability to make the lives of customers easier. AI can be trained to understand and respond to human interactions and nuanced demands, thereby making it possible to respond to evolved customer needs. Customers want providers that can make their lives easier to manage, and this human-machine collaboration can achieve that.