but only talked about in early 2023.<\/a><\/p>\nThe initial intent was to use RDC.ai\u2019s machine learning technology to improve the lending experience for business customers and bankers, with a particular emphasis on explainable credit decisioning.<\/p>\n
At the AWS financial services symposium in Sydney this month, both Westpac and RDC indicated the partnership has broadened to cover generative and agentic AI, and more use cases beyond credit decisioning.<\/p>\n
But the bank remained reluctant to reveal too much about how it uses the technology.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen we look at the tangible outcomes, there are a number of areas I can’t talk about too much because they\u2019re market sensitive,\u201d head of technology and business lending Dr Martin Anderson said.<\/p>\n
The technology is serving its initial purpose: influencing the way the bank assesses credit applications from its business customers.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf we can understand the data, we can be transparent about the reasons we approve or decline applications, or we can be transparent with the way we want to treat customers, either by extending credit or helping them manage them through some hardship,\u201d RDC.ai\u2019s cofounder and chief market and strategy officer Gordon Campbell said of the initial use case.<\/p>\n
\u201cThose things will help banks deal with their customers more proactively.\u201d<\/p>\n
Anderson said it wasn\u2019t just about ensuring the right decision was made, but also that the outcome was explainable, which would go a long way to \u201cmaking the regulator comfortable with what we’re doing.\u201d<\/p>\n
By all accounts, the technology has worked to the point that broader use of AI in the business bank can now be contemplated.<\/p>\n
Anderson predicted that AI, in its various forms, would \u201chave an impact at every single stage of the [lending] process.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWe will have to leverage it to get the most out of the technology and to get the best outcome for our customers,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhether it is faster decisions, better decisions, protecting the customers, protecting ourselves from fraud and scams and the like, the usage of AI will be even more ubiquitous than it is now.\u201d<\/p>\n
Anderson suggested that the whole process sequence would be redesigned for AI.<\/p>\n
\u201cPeople are going to be surprised by how these sequences are going to be reorganised, resequenced, rewired,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt’s not just going to be a case of adding in AI-specific points; it’s actually reimagining the process so that you can actually optimise it to leverage AI and all the various capabilities.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhether it’s within documentation, KYC [know your customer], annual reviews, credit decisioning, the writing of credit memos, even communications – the whole end-to-end sequence of business lending can be optimised.\u201d<\/p>\n
Campbell said that RDC.ai has been working with Westpac and AWS on \u201chow we can bring products to market that safely use agentic capability \u2026 that enable the bank to realise outcomes that they wouldn’t otherwise realise.\u201d<\/p>\n
He raised the prospect of an \u201cinteraction bot\u201d to interact with portfolio governance and cashflow information within the business bank – data that is presently analysed in Excel or PowerPoint.<\/p>\n
Anderson indicated there was latent and untapped value in the data holdings of the business bank.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen you are looking at a dataset that [contains] ingoings and outgoings of an organisation like Westpac, it’s in the order of trillions of dollars of value, and we are mining that,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere is so much insight in there, so much information, so much we can[use to]\u00a0 help our customers get a better experience [and] help them make better decisions.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat’s where we are really leaning into.\u201d<\/p>\n
Anderson said that the three-way partnership between Westpac, RDC.ai and AWS acted as an effective accelerator to experiment with AI to solve key business problems.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere’s an awful lot that we have available to us and a huge backlog of activity that we have that we probably wouldn’t be able to deliver at the pace that we are [without the partnership],\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cSometimes those experiments can be promoted to production, but sometimes it’s actually \u2026 for a hypothesis that can inform a roadmap,\u201d Campbell added. \u201cWe’ve done that really successfully with Westpac.\u201d<\/p>\n
AI is anticipated to be incorporated into BizEdge, a digital tool Westpac built to reduce paperwork around \u201capplying for a new loan, topping up an existing one, or setting up an overdraft\u201d, as is described in Westpac\u2019s documentation.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat’s opened up huge areas for AI optimisation,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
AI is also expected to help the bank realise a commitment of \u201cbringing in more and new bankers to help our customers\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat brings a natural challenge where you have new bankers coming in and you have the policies, processes and products, and we’re expecting them to be experts in all these things,\u201d Anderson said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat’s a massive challenge, but something like AI helps enormously in guiding them through all of these things.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat we found as well is not only does it really help the bankers and the customers, but it’s made us look at some constructs of documents and say: \u2018Actually, these need to be better, because they’re sometimes ambiguous or they\u2019re conflicting\u2019.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is actually being called out by using AI tools, which is a bit of an unexpected benefit there.\u201d<\/p>\n
Ry Crozier attended the AWS financial services symposium in Sydney as a guest of AWS.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Westpac is anticipating a role for AI at every stage of the business lending process, building on the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":219552,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[256,254,255,64,63,105],"class_list":{"0":"post-219551","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-au","12":"tag-australia","13":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/219551","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=219551"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/219551\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/219552"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=219551"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=219551"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=219551"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}