News flash.....ANZ feeding robots with defective products and data...
Then Bankers can blame the computerised system for fraudulent advice and fudged
documentation and say "the Robot did it."
How ANZ Bank is expanding its use of cognitive computing
22 February 2016
Allie Coyne
http://www.itnews.com.au/news/how-anz-bank-is-expanding-its-use-of-cognitive-computing-415402
But robots won’t replace people.
ANZ Bank is expanding its use of cognitive computing globally into areas like advisory, risk, and back office automation, but its chief technology officer is adamant robots aren't going to replace human staff. The bank has been the highest profile user of IBM's Watson since it first announced it would implement the technology in May 2013.
It spent the following 12 months feeding product data into the intelligence engine, and in late 2014 ANZ’s wealth group revealed it had adopted Watson into its Grow centre in Sydney as a tool for financial advisors to use as they liaise with customers. The tool is now available in ANZ’s Melbourne Grow centre, and aims to help financial advisors offer services better tailored to a person’s life events - such as weddings, deaths, and real estate purchases.
ANZ trained Watson by loading it with information including product disclosure statements, market data, financial statements and terms and conditions of its wealth products. It narrowed down to a thousands-long list of questions what customers were likely to ask their advisors and created a thesaurus to help Watson understand non-standard terminology that might be used in a client query.
“If we want to become more relevant as an industry, and move from product orientation into more life-stage banking, where we can match products to important events in our customers' lives irrespective of life stage, you really need to complement product capability with advisory capabilities,” ANZ CTO Patrick Maes told iTnews on the sidelines of the CIO Strategy Summit last week.
The bank has also partnered with Experian for intelligent risk scoring and pricing. The first implementation of the Experian risk platform has only just gone live, Maes revealed, and is already seeing results including faster approval times for unsecured and personal loans.
“In the lending space where we typically have multiple front and middle office backend systems and complexity ... we wanted to build capability that was intelligent and that could deal with internal and external sources ... where we could increase the automation and reduce time to market for approval of unsecured and personal loans,” Maes said.
The bank has already seen approval times decrease by 5 percent. Around 150,000 more applicants are now receiving an immediate answer to their request thanks to a 50 percent increase in automation, according to the CTO, and 1000 hours of back office activity has been removed.
“That’s only the first case,” Maes said. “So imagine you keep building on this capability and you use more external resources - it makes it more intelligent. "It’s a self-learning system, so if we approve a loan that doesn’t seem to be successful, we use the feedback and learn from mistakes to make the system more intelligent. By constantly tuning you reduce effort in your middle and back office.”
The third use-case of intelligent computing Maes identified at ANZ Bank was “robots” for better straight-through processing. In a normal investigation of payments exchanged between a financial institution and ANZ Bank, around 65,000 pages need to be searched, and the correct BSB needs to be identified among 14,500 BSBs located in around ten different channels, Maes said.
Using “robots” in the back office has reduced the steps that need to be taken in these investigations from 38 to five, he said, while customer resolution time has fallen by 80 percent for inbound and 50 percent for outbound traffic, and 80 percent of investigations are completed on the same day.
“That’s just an example of how one little robot has solved a fantastic problem,” Maes said. “We have 529 of these robots in production across the world ... who are focusing on taking these repetitive tasks out of the workforce.”
Just starting
Maes sees the bank’s journey with cognitive computing as only at the very beginning, with many more opportunities on the horizon. He revealed ANZ is looking at how this technology can be implemented to allow software issues to self-repair before outages can occur. “It’s intelligent automation,” he said. “It’s being able to anticipate and repair. Not everything can be rule-based.”
Maes described this kind of function - which currently does not exist on the market - as providing both the capability to predict what might happen in terms of outages and abnormal activity, and the intelligence for remedial action. “If you have an object [in an agile environment] that can test itself, the next step is to have an object that can self-repair,” he said.
“If an object stops working because it is out of memory or the garbage collector is not working, it is the ability to look at what has happened before you’re even out of memory or before your garbage collector gets into trouble and monitor what’s happening. “Even before the monitoring module can see a server is out because certain software has done the wrong thing, it’s basically identified at the component level.”
The bank is looking at how to improve resiliency and reliability in software for services where five 9’s or 100 percent uptime is needed - like in payments - but Maes noted there is no packaged solution currently available on the market. “There are multiple algorithms and a lot of research happening in that space. Is there a mainstream capability? No. It’s evolving but isn’t there yet.”
Not the holy grail
Despite Maes’ clear enthusiasm for cognitive computing - he has a Masters degree in AI and cognitive sciences and has spent several decades working in computer science globally - he is emphatic that such technology will not remove the need for human staff. He refutes the concept of singularity and argues AI will simply replace the repetitive tasks we have created for ourselves, allowing staff to tackle more complex activities out of reach for AI.
“I hear so many people say robotisation of the back office will reduce the need for back office people - absolutely this is nonsense,” Maes said. “This is just taking the monotone and repetitive tasks we have created through complexity in the IT landscape out, where we basically have humans becoming the integration between two systems; that is what will be replaced.
"By doing so you increase the customer experience, and you can redirect your people to provide a better experience for customers. “This is not the holy grail for straight-through processing, let me be very clear. It will not reduce the need for back office people.”
Rise of the machines as ANZ brings in robot workers to do the 'boring' jobs
24 April 2015
First jobs went to India, now ANZ Banking Group is leading the way locally in a global rise of robot software systems, which can do the work of employees in fields ranging from payroll administration to helpdesk support and customer service in a fraction of the time.
ANZ has spent the past year refining a well-developed program of work in an emerging field known as Robotic Process Automation (RPA), whereby tasks previously conducted by employees are now done by increasingly intelligent software that learns on the job.
Much of the robotic work is initially being conducted in ANZ's network of so-called captive centres or hubs in India, the Philippines and China, but some Australian roles are already changing to incorporate the new systems. The bank says it is not a job reduction strategy, rather it is a move to existing operations and to refocus human workers on new areas.
The emerging business trend is explained in a new report on RPA from Sydney-headquartered vendor agnostic sourcing and management advisory firm Mindfields, which says companies will see cost savings of more than 30 per cent across key RPA-centric functions such as finance and accounting, human resources and supply chain, within the next one to two years.
The report predicts that RPA will have a significant impact on labour markets, leading to a change in hiring strategy and the mix of staffing required by organisations. It also cites figures from Transparency Market Research estimating the nascent global IT robotic automation market will reach $US4.98 billion ($6.8 billion) by 2020, up from $US183.1 million in 2013.
Fifteen leading service providers such as IBM, HP and Cognizant have participated and been benchmarked on their RPA strategies in the report. There are more than 38 case studies of RPA engagements. This report will be released by ANZ in September.
Not for culling staff
ANZ's general manager of group hubs Simen Munter told The Australian Financial Review the bank had been running pilot programs in all areas of the business, but work is most advanced in its finance department, HR, payments and mortgage processing. He says RPA is not being used as a method of culling staff, and that in the 40 processes currently conducted by robot software, workers had generally been moved on to higher-value and more rewarding tasks.
"It is a bit like Iron Man, where we augment our people so that one person can do a lot more because they only need to intervene in processes when an exception occurs," Munter says. "Clearly you need less effort to do the same work, but at the same time you are not necessarily doing the same work any more … We are not looking at less people, but if I look at the hubs then the pace of recruitment has dropped off very significantly."
He says that in one area of payments, ANZ has been able to reduce the number of human staff to two from 40. Most of the workers' time had been spent fixing errors that arose daily, however the errors were nearly always the same and once the robotic systems had learned how to react, the humans could be redeployed.
Monotonous, time-consuming tasks the focus
While it is expected that the levels of artificial intelligence in RPA systems will improve to allow it to conduct more sophisticated and analytical work in future, it is mainly focused on monotonous and time-consuming procedural tasks at present.
RPA is essentially a software robot or application that can be configured to perform tasks normally performed by a human, using rule-based processes. It sits on top of existing technology systems and consistently repeats tasks it has learned to perform. Some of the tasks taken on by robots includes payroll administration, invoice processing, complaint management, helpdesk support, claims management and procurement work.
It is a new area in the business tech space and relatively small tech companies are winning contracts with big companies eager to tap into the space. ANZ is primarily working with growing US players OpenSpan and Automation Anywhere, but many of the biggest Indian and US outsourcing vendors are scrambling to incorporate RPA into their offerings.
Because the software sits on top of existing systems, it does not require the major integration work often associated with tech improvements at banks and large institutions. Munter says ANZ has four main aims with robotics; to improve work for staff, to add shareholder value, to improve customer service and increase the control it has over its systems and processes.
Improving, not replacing jobs
"I think if people's jobs are to do things that robots can do, then that is not a good place to be. It is a challenge for us to ensure we actually move people into roles and enhance the roles so that they adapt," he said. "There are likely to be significant changes in many professional roles as we go along. But then again, when I was doing my degree there used to be a role called bookkeeper. Those don't exist any more, but there has never been more people employed in accounting as today, the roles are just different."
Mindfields managing director Mohit Sharma says ANZ appears to be ahead of its big four banking rivals in the move towards adopting RPA, and is advantaged in this regard by the fact it runs its own offshore operations, rather than relying on service providers. Other organisations making strides globally include Mastercard, Visa, US retailer Target, Dell, MetLife, the UK National Health Service, Intel, T-Mobile, Lloyds Banking Group, Deutsche Bank and Merrill Lynch.
Sharma says while it is natural to fear the rise of machines and assume mass unemployment as a result, history has proven this does not happen. He says the initial appeal of RPA would be to compliment and improve the quality of employees' work lives. "It aims to assist employees to move up the value chain from monotonous, routine and repetitive jobs … RPA is converting normal humans into super humans as they can now do [a higher] volume of jobs with lower cost and almost no errors," he says.
"The world population has increased by 30 per cent since 1990 but the average global unemployment rate has never crossed 10 per cent. The emergence of machines in the form of computers, the internet and now artificial intelligence has shown that the new roles emerging are always greater in number than roles displaced."