Data ‘Connects the Dots’ to New Revenue Opportunities for Banks

Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) has been among the buzzwords that are universal — cutting across all aspects of everyday life and promising to upend and reshape all manner of industries.

Cory Mann, vice president of product at FNBO, told PYMNTS that GenAI is already having an impact in financial services, helping banks help clients gain insight into spending patterns and predict future cash flows. But to truly leverage GenAI, he said, banks must take stock of the data that’s available to them, with an eye on not just how GenAI can bring innovation to client-facing interactions but can improve the very operations of the financial institution itself.

Mann’s comments and insights, offered up as part of the “What’s Next in Payments: Memo to GenAI Companies” series, detailed how FNBO, with roots stretching back to the 1850s, has been using the technology to craft new offerings and services to its 6 million customers spread across eight states.

“As a well-established financial institution,” Mann said, using AI is part of “a journey — and what needs to be top of mind for us is trust, and making sure that we are approaching customers with opportunities and use cases that meet them where they are. … GenAI helps us connect the dots that historically we were unable to connect.”

Setting the Foundation

Harnessing GenAI, he said, begins with a stable foundation that combines the wealth of data that’s on hand with strong governance and oversight as FNBO looks at GenAI-powered innovations.

“That’s really where many companies should be starting at this point as they look at new use cases,” he told PYMNTS, saying key questions asked and answered must include “How do you do so through a lens that has an appreciation for things like risk, data security, and to the degree that you’re ready to introduce GenAI into a customer experience, you can do so in a seamless, trusted fashion.”

As FNBO has sought to do just that, Mann said, and the bank has been arming its own employees to help improve operating efficiencies.

“GenAI is great at helping us interact with and extract large amounts of data and interpreting them more quickly,” he said. From his own vantage point with FNBO, Mann oversees the customer experience function within the 167-year-old bank — and GenAI is proving its worth as a tool used to sort through what he termed “the tremendous amount” of customer feedback, categorizing that feedback as it’s passed on to employees in the move to solve customer issues in a timely fashion.

The bank has seen the benefits internally, Mann said, as GenAI, “helps us consolidate and aggregate the massive amounts of data that we have to manage. … We sit on countless pages of policy information, procedures and ways to operate. Being able to use tools like internal chat and internal knowledge bases help us sort through that information more efficiently.”

In addition, FNBO is using GenAI to fine tune its own software development to generate code more quickly, which in turn shortens product development cycles.

Asked about what’s most urgently needed as banks including FNBO bring GenAI capabilities more fully on board, Mann said that a “memo” to GenAI providers would steer those tech firms to partner with banks to focus on fighting fraud, “to make sure our industry is able to quickly identify bad actors, and make sure that we’re quickly able to validate that the people we’re doing business with are trusted individuals.”

As he told PYMNTS, GenAI “can help us find ways to make the industry safer and continue to build trust and credibility with consumers and businesses. That’s going to be critical to unlocking AI’s potential for all of us.”