This article is sponsored by VASS Intelygenz.

Successfully integrating AI into core business services isn’t a straightforward approach—this requires strategic foresight into AI and how it best aligns with business, regulatory compliance, and operational efficiency.

Putting this into action and delivering AI solutions can drive real impact, especially for those in the financial industry. At VASS Intelygenz, we personalize services for our customers, automate their manual operations, and improve efficiencies. We work through the whole AI project lifecycle, conceptualizing, developing, deploying, and maintaining custom AI solutions that solve real business problems. All of which are reshaping how financial institutions operate by enhancing their client interactions and uncovering new market opportunities.

However, AI is not as simple as flipping a switch. According to a Gartner research, only 15% of AI solutions deployed by 2022 will be successful, let alone create ROI positive value. The path from implementation to achieving measurable ROI can feel complex and daunting. Identifying the right solutions, navigating the complexities of AI, and ensuring AI initiatives deliver measurable ROI have often led financial institutions to a standstill when it comes to their AI implementation.

With over two decades of expertise in machine learning and AI, we’ve helped financial institutions unlock the potential of AI to deliver real business value. Here, we outline three key lessons to keep in mind as you start your AI implementation process.

1. Align AI With Your Business and Change Management Strategy

The most successful AI initiatives start with a clear alignment to your business goals. Instead of jumping into technology innovations, identify the core challenges your organization is facing and determine how AI can address them. Are you looking to reduce operational costs? Improve customer retention? Prevent fraud? Only then should you consider which AI solutions will address these challenges.

Actively involve key stakeholders, including leadership and operational teams, during the implementation phase. This collaborative approach ensures that everyone understands the strategy, leading to smoother implementation and better ROI.

It’s integral that you invest in training and communication to help employees adopt AI tools with confidence, so they become champions of the technology rather than resistors.

2. Make Sure to Implement AI Safely

While the potential of AI-powered solutions in finance are vast, the risks are equally significant. Financial organizations deal with highly sensitive information and operate in tightly regulated environments. Implementing AI safely is non-negotiable.

The finance industry is a signifier of importance when it comes to balancing innovation and compliance. AI systems within finance that automate credit scoring or detect fraudulent activities must adhere to strict regulations and industry-specific requirements. Before adoption, ensure that your AI solutions meet ethical guidelines, operational standards, and legal compliance.

Another critical consideration is explainability. Stakeholders, from board members to customers, need clarity on how AI systems get to their conclusions. Choose solutions that incorporate transparency tools, such as explainable AI models, so you can maintain trust while also fulfilling regulatory requirements.

3. Have Confidence in Proof of Concepts (PoCs)

AI is advancing rapidly, and businesses that hesitate to move beyond pilot projects risk missing out on its full potential. To maximize ROI, you must scale your first steps into AI with a fully integrated, organization-wide solution.

While pilot projects allow you to test AI solutions on a small scale, their impact remains limited without transitioning to full-scale deployment. Leading organizations are fast-tracking this process, transforming successful PoCs into actionable, large-scale AI systems. This shift enables businesses to get ahead of their competition, enhance profitability, and reduce costs.

Implementing AI successfully into your financial organization involves more than just an interest in emerging technologies. It requires alignment with your unique business strategy, identifying your challenges as well as having ROI in the forefront of your mind.

At VASS Intelygenz, we bring over 20 years of experience to the table, with a proven process that streamlines AI adoption, from scoping opportunities to rapid experimentation, so you can unlock value quickly and deliver ROI faster. We’re committed to helping financial institutions unlock the true potential of AI.

Want to learn more about this topic? Join us at our presentation at FinovateSpring on May 7th at 2:45pm to explore real-life examples and strategies for implementing transformative AI. Find out more here.

This is a sponsored article by Glassbox.

Fintech leaders, C-suite executives, and investors are facing an epic challenge: How do we adapt our customer acquisition strategies as the landscape becomes more competitive? In this article, we’ll highlight the challenges fintech companies face in customer acquisitions and the benefits of digital experience intelligence (DXI) in understanding your customer behaviors and challenges. Armed with those insights, you’ll be better able to navigate the ever-evolving fintech environment to grow your customer base and nurture your existing customers.

Want to know which of your marketing assets was most viewed by new conversions? Done!

Wondering where the common dropoff points are in your mobile app? No sweat.

Here are ten ways DXI can inform and refine customer acquisition strategies for fintech companies to acquire more of their ideal customers.

1. Identifying Acquisition Opportunities

Digital experience intelligence enables your organization to measure and analyze how users interact with your website or mobile app. Analyzing these journeys provides insight into pain points and areas of high engagement for potential customers. This initial informational process can help you tailor your product offerings and marketing outreach to engage your ideal customers.

Note: Be sure you’re targeting your ideal customers – the ones who truly need and will benefit from your products or services. Understanding who they are, and making that extra effort, will pay off with a client base that is bought in and wants your solutions to work for them.

2. Data-Driven Optimization

Leveraging insights from digital experience intelligence can help identify which marketing channels attract your target audience. In addition, user behavior analysis can measure the effectiveness of ad campaigns to optimize them across different channels.

👉🏻 For tips on gaining and retaining digital banking customers, check out this guide: 5 Mobile App Optimization Best Practices for Banks.

3. Personalization at Scale

Personalizing customer experiences is one of the most effective ways to increase engagement and conversion rates, especially during the consideration and decision-making stages. A digital experience intelligence platform like Glassbox is the easiest and most effective way to gain critical insights into how users interact with your platform.

You can then use that data to segment customers by a variety of metrics to provide more relevant, personalized digital experiences. The data gained can also be used to inform product recommendations, web content, and marketing messages, as well as cater to specific preferences, all of which can boost engagement and conversions.

4. Mobile Optimization

Nearly 40% of app uninstallations occur because people are simply not using the app. The best way to understand why customers are abandoning your app is by measuring and monitoring your customer journeys. Armed with that information, you can refine your app to ensure it’s relevant, intuitive, and user-friendly so your users are never tempted to select “Remove app.”

5. A/B Testing for Optimization

Data-driven insights are the holy grail of refining customer acquisition strategies. A/B testing enables companies to understand which versions of websites, apps, and offers perform best in attracting and converting potential customers. The insights you gain can inform continuous improvement of user experience and refine your customer acquisition strategies.

6. Proactively Addressing Customer Pain Points

Technology like Real User Monitoring (RUM) and newer iterations like Real User Experience (RUX) enable fintech companies to quickly detect and resolve technical issues.

The ability to swiftly address user experience pain points and intercept technical snags before they escalate can transform your customer’s journey from one of frustration into a smooth and responsive experience that makes them feel valued. With 80% of consumers reporting that customer experiences need to be improved, proactive engagement is your golden ticket to differentiation.

7. Unlocking More Substantial Customer Feedback with AI

Voice of the Customer (VoC) data captures customer feedback so you can gain a deeper understanding of their digital experiences. However, VoC data only represents the vocal minority—our internal analysis found that only about 4% of users provide feedback.

Fintech companies can now leverage AI to automatically compare these rated interactions to similar interactions across the entire user base. We do this at Glassbox with our Voice of the Silent (VoS) tool, which makes it easier to understand what the majority is experiencing, even when they blow off satisfaction surveys.

8. Building Customer Trust Through Transparency

Building customer trust is the most direct path to loyalty. Digital experience intelligence reveals where users hesitate to provide information or engage, which can reveal areas for improving transparency about data privacy and security measures. Addressing those concerns demonstrates your commitment to user safety, which puts you further along the path to customer trust and loyalty.

9. Clear The Biggest Hurdle: Knowing What Your Customers Want

With fintech products and services flooding the market, customers have an exhausting supply of options if you fall short of their expectations for seamless digital experiences. Understanding how they experience interactions with your website or mobile app is critical to effectively measuring, analyzing, improving, and ultimately ensuring customers feel understood and appreciated.

10. Make Customer Acquisition Everyone’s Business

Customer acquisition should be an all-encompassing, organization-wide effort – not just the job of marketing or product development. Lasting relationships are supported at multiple levels and in diverse ways, and playing that message on repeat is essential to making it stick.

Want to see what DXI actually looks like in action? Click around in Glassbox’s self-guided platform tour.

Today’s customers want personalized experiences, but how can companies drive meaningful one-on-one connections at scale?

Data wins!

Handled correctly, well-orchestrated data reaches customers the way they want to be reached: fast and seamless while facilitating loyalty and trust.

The next generation customer experience is made easier with LeanData, the leading Revenue Orchestration platform. LeanData connects the dots for over 1,000 companies, increasing speed-to-response and aligning go-to-market motions with efficiency.

• 90% reduction in data duplication
• 78% decrease in time needed to research records
• 5 hours per week saved by eliminating manual processes
• Time-to-response decreased from 1 to 2 days to less than 1 hour
• 35% increase in customer retention rates

Join LeanData at FinovateSpring next week and see it in action.

This is a sponsored post by Indium Software

2023 is bringing new regulations and transparency requirements to shape the Banking, Financial Services, and Insurance (BFSI) marketplace. This guide, Navigating the Path to Data Modernization in the BFSI Industry, explores the practical steps business leaders can take to accomplish their objectives — from identifying suitable technological solutions to effectively implementing them to maximize their influence.

By following these recommendations, you as a business leader can embark on a successful journey of modernization that not only fosters growth, but also enhances the profitability of your business.

Key Highlights

• Banking Data Modernization Challenges
• Numbers Don’t Lie!
• Data Modernization Isn’t a Brand-New Concept
• Data Modernization – The Need of the Hour
• The Journey of Data Modernization
• First Step to Data Modernization
• Data Modernization Roadmap: The 8 Pillars of a Winning Strategy
• The End Objectives of Data Modernization
• No Disruption on the Road to Digitization – Cheat Sheet: Key Tips for Next-Gen BFSI Orgs & How Can Indium Help

Read the e-book>>

This is a sponsored post by Accusoft.

Fintech software has become a critical component of the financial services industry, allowing customers to readily access financial products on their own terms while also enhancing operational efficiency. Digital technology continues to revolutionize the way financial institutions operate, and developers work hard to create new applications that can manage workloads previously spread across multiple systems and software.

Document viewing and sharing capabilities are among the most important features for fintech applications. While developers can use a variety of document lifecycle solutions to avoid the difficult task of building those features from scratch, the financial industry faces unique security and compatibility requirements when it comes to selecting integration partners. To fully understand these technical challenges, it’s important to understand the role of Java in the development of today’s fintech applications.

How Java Became So Important to the Financial Industry

Financial institutions were early adopters of computerized workflows. The first electronic communication network that made it possible to trade financial products outside the stock market floor was introduced in 1969. Computerized order flows became more widespread in the 1970s, with most institutions developing their own in-house systems. Digitization really took off in the 1980s and early 1990s following the introduction of the Bloomberg terminal and the Financial Information eXhange (FIX) protocol. In the late 1990s, the Nasdaq made it possible to execute securities trades without manual intervention by adopting Island ECN.

Java burst onto the programming language scene in 1995, and its arrival proved to be well-timed. The late 1990s and early 2000s saw extensive mergers and acquisitions in the financial industry, which left many companies struggling to integrate disparate applications and data. Java programming language, with its ability to support multiple platforms (“Write once, run anywhere” was an early slogan used by Sun Microsystems) proved to be an attractive solution to this challenge, and many financial applications were ported into Java. It also helped that Java was easy to use and orders of magnitude faster than legacy code running on outdated platforms.

Within just a few years, Java became the dominant programming language for the financial services industry. Its popularity only accelerated after the release of OpenJDK, a free and open-source implementation of the language, in 2007. By 2011, an Oracle report estimated that over 80% of electronic trading applications and almost all FIX engines were written using Java. Even now, nearly 30 years after its introduction, Java remains the dominant programming language used by financial services, far outpacing other open-source alternatives.

Why the Financial Industry Loves Java

Developers in the financial sector haven’t just stuck with Java for so long out of habit or inertia; Java’s distinctive features make it uniquely suited for the needs of financial applications, both for longstanding enterprise-grade banking systems and innovative new fintech solutions.

Security

It goes without saying that security is always a top consideration in the financial services industry. Banking and trading applications need to have security measures in place to protect financial data and personally identifiable information from unauthorized access. Java makes it easy to restrict data access and offers a variety of memory safety features that mitigate potential vulnerabilities, especially those caused by common programming errors. Oracle also continues to provide regular updates that patch known vulnerabilities and account for the latest cybersecurity threats.

Portability

As a platform-independent language, Java applications can run on almost any device. This has always been a major advantage in the financial industry, but it has proved even more valuable in the age of cloud computing and mobile applications. Developers can use the same code to deploy software in a virtual environment and make it accessible to end-users from their smartphones, computers, or other devices. Java virtual machines also support other programming languages, which further enhances the language’s flexibility.

Reliability

Since Java has been in continuous use for nearly 30 years and enjoys support from a robust development community, it has become one of the most reliable programming languages in the world. Potential instabilities have long since been addressed and there are many developer tools and documentation available to ensure that software is built upon a strong foundation. This is critically important for banking and financial applications, which require high levels of performance paired with fault tolerance.

The Need for Java-Based Document Viewing & Sharing

As fintech developers continue to build new applications that make life easier for customers and employees within the financial sector, they are increasingly finding that users expect more when it comes to viewing and sharing documents. Nobody wants to waste time and resources processing paper documents by hand, and most organizations want to avoid the security risks that come with relying on external applications for managing digital documents.

Unfortunately, today’s application users expect complex document viewing capabilities that are difficult for most developers to build from scratch. While there are several integrations available that can add document lifecycle features, most of them are not Java based and require additional development work to incorporate them into existing fintech solutions. Without the ability to support viewing, sharing, and editing natively within the Java application, users often turn to workarounds involving external programs, which creates security and version confusion risks.

Implementing Java-based Document Features with VirtualViewer

Accusoft’s VirtualViewer is a powerful HTML5 document viewing solution built from the ground up using Java to ensure maximum compatibility with fintech applications in the financial services industry while also meeting complex functionality and security requirements. With support for diverse document types, such as PDF, TIFF, JPEG, AFP, PCL, and Microsoft Office, VirtualViewer eliminates the need for multiple viewing solutions to create a better user experience within fintech software.

As a Java-based integration, VirtualViewer is compatible with almost any operating system and is both easy to implement and manage. No software needs to be installed on the user’s desktop, which allows fintech developers to roll out a scalable solution that meets their critical security and business continuity requirements within a single, high-speed application. VirtualViewer’s server component quickly renders and delivers individual document pages for local viewing as needed so users can access, view, annotate, redact, and manipulate financial documents on the fly. Since documents are displayed within the web-based viewer, there’s no need to download or transfer files, which enhances both security and efficiency.

When implemented as a replacement for a mortgage lender’s content management system, VirtualViewer made it possible to import and deliver more than half a million documents across the enterprise each day. Documents could be retrieved and viewed in under two seconds, contributing to a 40% improvement in mortgage processing times.

Enhance Your Java Fintech Application with VirtualViewer

Accusoft’s VirtualViewer provides true cross-platform document support for your Java-based applications. Whether you’re deploying your application within the cloud, on-prem, or as part of a hybrid environment, VirtualViewer’s powerful APIs can instantly provide your software with the document viewing and sharing features your customers are looking for. Installing the viewer takes less than ten minutes, and our out-of-the-box connectors make it easy to quickly connect to leading ECM applications, including Alfresco, IBM, and Pegasystems.

See for yourself: take VirtualViewer for a test drive and experience all the features available for your Java-based application.