Financial services industry leaders discuss open banking, AI and regulatory

What challenges and opportunities do you see with AI?

Danni Wright | Managing Director, Head of Utah & Idaho | J.P. Morgan Private Bank

If you look at the percentage of dollars we’re spending on technology and fraud prevention and the fintech that we were buying, it’s a great portion of our entire spending. I think part of the reason people say banking is boring is because there are a lot of mundane tasks that all of us have to do. If we can automate that, I think we’ll attract better talent, create better outcomes for our customers and clients, and be more efficient. There are also concerns about AI going too far, so we’re trying to navigate that balance right now. A lot remains to be discovered and learned, and we’re looking for people who understand AI to work in banking because they’re the ones who are going to help us figure it out.

Justin Olson | CEO & President | Utah Community Credit Union

The biggest opportunity in AI is about giving humans better judgment, flagging some risks they might not have seen initially, and putting some guardrails around the joyless work. Compliance, AI and risk are all really complementary. They’re not hurdles; they’re enablers of each other. 

I think consumers’ financial lives are so fragmented. If we look at it, they probably bank with all of us. That’s the promise of open banking: You can get a holistic view of a consumer’s life. They can, too, and it can help them make better-informed decisions. But it’s also really nuanced and risky. … You can tell that open banking is still very much like a teenager. It’s unruly. It needs some help, but it’s still growing up. The people who use it on average add five accounts to our online banking. They can see relationships more broadly. Their overall financial health is much better than consumers who don’t use those tools.

Brock Blake | Founder & CEO | Lendio

We work with a bank down in South Texas. One of the AI services they use looks at deposit account transaction data and evaluates that data to determine the cash flow health of the business. Then, once the cash flow health is identified, does it meet the credit policy of the financial institution? They did this and found about 40 percent of their deposit base would meet their credit policy. One of these customers was a Mexican woman who owned a really, really profitable business and had never taken a loan in her life. Part of the reason why she never took a loan was because she was really nervous to go in the branch. There was a little bit of a language barrier. She also had a thin credit profile. They ended up sending the loan to her, and the loan is performing. This is exactly what we want to do as a financial institution. We never would have lent to this customer had we not used some of these tools to open up and look at the cash flow of the business a bit differently than they would’ve looked at it historically.

David Stahl | President, Utah & Idaho | Hillcrest Bank

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