From customer engagement and decision making to product design and software engineering, GenAI holds immense potential. In particular, banks stand to gain substantial benefits from this cutting-edge technology when it comes to financial and commercial real estate (CRE). With GenAI-enabled solutions becoming present-day realities, areas such as market research, loan origination, customer onboarding, portfolio monitoring, and regulatory reporting are undergoing significant enhancements.
Let's explore the potential of GenAI in lending in greater detail.
What is GenAI?
Generative AI, or GenAI as it's also known, refers to models that can generate new, original content based on the patterns they have learned during their training phase. One of the most advanced models in this category is GPT-4, which has shown remarkable capabilities in understanding context, generating human-like text, and even performing tasks that require a certain level of understanding and creativity.
Building upon the foundation of Artificial Intelligence (AI), GenAI represents the next step in the evolution of machine learning technologies. AI, in its broader sense, encompasses technologies that mimic human intelligence. This includes Machine Learning (ML), a subset of AI that uses statistical techniques to learn from data and improve over time. One notable ML application in banking is OCR Machine Learning, which combines Optical Character Recognition (OCR) with ML to interpret text from scanned documents or images. These technologies have paved the way for GenAI, enabling it to learn from patterns and generate original, contextually appropriate content.
The role of GenAI in lending
The banking sector, with its sustained digitization, large customer-facing workforces, strict regulatory environment, and categorization as a white-collar industry, is strategically poised to embrace GenAI.
Banks are beginning to tap into the potential of GenAI for routine tasks such as customer service, risk monitoring, and decision making. This leads to key benefits including elevated customer satisfaction, streamlined decision-making processes, enhanced employee experience, and bolstered risk monitoring.
In lending, GenAI holds the potential to streamline loan origination, portfolio monitoring, and regulatory compliance, making these processes more efficient and customer centric. GenAI can automate and adapt to underwriting and pre-approval credit processes, building objective pre-screening criteria and synthesizing information required by credit officers. This not only saves time, but also allows the front office to focus on engaging new business.
Considerations when implementing GenAI
While the potential of GenAI in lending is enormous, its successful implementation requires a thoughtful, strategic approach as well as careful consideration of a range of factors, including governance, responsible use, and ethical considerations.
Questions on algorithmic bias, customer data protection, and ethical implications must be addressed. Institutions may need to invest in enterprise-wide education around AI and GenAI and design new operating models to allow for a controlled mix of human and technological interaction.
What's next
In our next blog post, we will delve deeper into one of the key applications of GenAI in lending: streamlining the loan origination process. Stay tuned to learn how GenAI is revolutionizing this complex and crucial aspect of lending.
Learn more about how Moody’s is using AI to revolutionize the commercial lending process
