Generative AI: Revolutionizing financial services... and everyday life

The next five years will see an exponential use of generative AI creeping into our personal and professional lives. It will affect us in many ways, some of which we have yet to imagine.

As part of our personal lives – and with financial services becoming ever more embedded and invisible in the tools, products and services around us – many of generative AI’s future uses will be an amalgamation of various financial products intertwined with our daily living needs.

As generative AI systems better understand and create human-like language, their ability to perform complex tasks from natural language – such as creating developer code, interacting with customers and developing financial reports with data insights – moves increasingly closer to becoming a reality.

Some of the more futuristic ideas for generative AI are listed below and offer a glimpse of where the industry could progress. Many of these use cases depend on the convergence and maturation of other technologies, such as the Internet of Things (IoT), open banking/open data, banking as a service, embedded finance and blockchain/distributed ledger technology:

Sentient house – Managing a house is a bit like managing a business, with incomes (salaries, earnings, etc.), outgoings (bills, maintenance, etc.), stock (food inventory, household cleaning items, etc.) and resources (family members). This information is rich in contextual data and can be used to optimize a household. Your house could have a central digital wallet and your stock of items; services and upkeep could be paid for via this wallet. Generative AI could use all this data predictively, from ensuring you regularly move to the most cost-effective utility prices to making payments for services automatically. For example, your house could notify you when your boiler breaks down, contact a service engineer automatically, book a slot with them and pay them with your authority. This is dependent on cutting edge IoT and open data, but generative AI comes into play in a similar fashion to the PFM 2.0 “concierge” service. You could have your own generative AI “digital butler” overlaid across all these services to help manage the household and its finances.

Digital soul – The generations born right now will have data on them from conception to death. The richness of a person’s data will exist on various platforms, and with the future adoption of open data standards, data can be aggregated at an individual’s request and a digital representation of that individual could be developed. Imagine the entirety of an individual’s data being entered into a generative AI large language model with data from the individual’s social accounts, financial products, health platforms, etc. You could have the "digital soul" of a loved one providing advice after they have passed away. This concept could extend to financially successful celebrity figures. For example, you could access your very own Warren Buffett "digital soul" AI, fed with all his trading strategies, book content, interviews, etc., that would be able to provide you with expert financial advice and wisdom from a simple voice command.

Ultra - personalized health insurance premiums – With generative AI’s increasing use in medical diagnosis and detection, insurance companies could, for example, use data from a customer's genetic testing to feed into specialized AI models to review genetics for likelihood of diseases. This insight could then be used to determine health insurance premiums. This theoretical usage ultimately comes with numerous ethical questions, but we already see health insurers utilizing data from wearable devices to perform a similar function today.

Personalized chief financial officer for your business – Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) already struggle with the daily overheads of running a business. Imagine a digital chief financial officer trained on a variety of accounting practices, financial strategies, regulations, etc., that is accessible via natural language to the SME. It could have access to the SME’s accounts and provide financial direction and strategies to help the business with issues related to cash flow, tax management, etc. This concept could replicate across the various C-suite personas. You could even have your own AI chief people officer advising on staffing matters.

Generative AI is here to stay: Financial institutions are already seeing the benefits of deploying AI tools internally to improve processes and accelerate work output and externally to develop new product offerings and provide richer customer experiences for end-consumers.