Tom Martin, Lenvi's Chief Technology Officer explores what ChatGPT means for FinTech.
Last week I had the pleasure of joining a panel at AltFi’s Festival of Finance in London discussing “What ChatGPT means for FinTech”. I was joined on the panel by Harriet Green, HSG, Professor Costas Andriopoulos, Bayes Business School and Adam Davis, Bain & Company. During the session we discussed the opportunities for FinTech brought about by OpenAI’s ChatGPT product and Large Language Models (LLMs) generally, we considered the challenges and discussed potential usages in the short term.
The challenges
The key themes that emerged from the AltFi panel were short to medium-term challenges and the suitability of using LLMs and other AI capabilities in customer-facing financial services. Regulation, explainability, audit and data protection were all raised as valid concerns why adoption in our sector will likely be more measured and slow compared to other industry sectors when considering the dramatic transformation that will take place as a result of ever improving Generative AI capabilities.
Whilst Financial Services and the FinTech sector might not be at the forefront of deploying GPT & other LLMs for customer-facing requirements (besides, perhaps, relatively basic chatbots on websites), the panel all agreed on one thing, GPT, LLMs and AI, in general, would all eventually make significant impacts on back office tasks and in the delivery of services.
Making a difference
Areas such as software engineering, design, business analysis and quality assurance are all areas that GPT (4.0) can already make a huge difference in. For example, providing the capability to make everyone involved in that process more efficient. Plus, with recent changes introduced by OpenAI to better safeguard user data, there are now fewer barriers for operators to safely explore this technology and the differences it could (will) make, in the delivery of better experiences to customers.
The Lenvi innovation challenge
At Lenvi, we’re hosting an innovation challenge in early July to allow our delivery & technology teams the opportunity to safely experiment with GPT and other AI technologies. The goal will be to host a science fair-style demonstration at the end of the event to showcase each team's work, with the hope that some of these experiments will lead to concepts we take forward. We believe that through the exploration of these technologies, we’ll be able to improve the efficiency of our teams and build better customer experiences, for our clients and their customers.