The First Finance Robot In Service (CBN interview with Deloitte)

Mr. Joseph Chu, Chief Digital Officer, Deloitte Analytics Institute Leader and Mr. Silas Zhu, Deloitte China AiA-IT Partner were interviewed exclusively by CBN-Close Analysis of the Market (第一财经-市场零距离) on August 23, 2017. The interview details are set forth below:

Application of AI in finance

Artificial intelligence (AI) enables machines to handle tasks that usually require human intelligence. AI has been involved in almost every aspect of human cognition and behaviors:

• Robots are able to talk based on speech synthesis technology;

• Robots can listen with speech recognition technology;

• Robots can see with drones, face recognition and image recognition technologies;

• Robots are able to understand, analyze and make decisions based on semantic analysis of natural language and self-driving technologies;

• Robots can move in the real world with mechanic alarms.

Currently, 60% of AI research in China focuses on speech recognition,understanding and synthesis, 12.5% on image recognition, and 27.5% on other fields. In 2017, AI investment amounts to $30 billion world-wide, of which Chinese market accounts for a share of 10%. The State Council released the Plan on Developing the New-generation AI in July 2017. Gartner identified AI as the top 1 among the ten new technologies in 2017. The support from the government for PE and VC in AI investment, enthusiasm for new technology research and desirable acceptance of new technologies in China, and human and capital input into research have provided a favorable environment for the development of AI industry in China.

AI is also widely used for commercial purposes. It is estimated that AI will replace 50% of human work in the next ten years:

• Tencent launched Dream writer in 2015; Alibaba and CBN jointly developed DT Writing Mater in 2016; CEIC.ac.cn released news automatically written by robots in 25 seconds after the earthquake in Jiuzhaigou, Sichuan Province on August 8, 2017.

• Google's self-driving cars have already completed 3 million kilometers in total.

• IFLYTEK has improved the speech recognition accuracy rate to 95% from 60.2%.

• Alipay's call centers are using smart robots todeal with customers, leading to higher self-service rate to 97% and customer satisfaction ratio increase of 3%.

• Drones and RFID are widely used in logistics for inventory and keeping track of logistics information.
  

“Artificial intelligence has been applied in the financial sector to replace artificial analysis, including forecast of financial trends and future stock prices,” said Joseph Chu, CDO and DAI leader, in the interview with CBN.

Deloitte China has established a Future Research Institute to study and provide guidance on the application and development of various intelligence technologies in future work place scenarios. RPA (Robotic Process Automation) technology, one practically applied AI technology in the business sector, is leveraged by the Robotics Center of Deloitte China in several enterprise processs cenarios, such as financial robot, tax robot, supply chain robot, auditing robot, logistics management robot, risk management robot, human resources robot, etc.

Application of Deloitte intelligent robots in finance

Deloitte’s financial service robots is based on the primary applicationof AI technology in the financial digitalization and enabled by the RPA technology. Briefly, that is a robotic software installed on computers to be taught for financial operations, as if teaching one new employee to operate.

As Deloitte’s financial service robots has been put into service, it will assist financial personnel in completing substantial repetitive matters to improve efficiency and give financial risk pre-warnings through big data collection and analysis.

“Financial service robots can replace one specific role to process throughout the workflow, such as replacing roles responsible for receivables to process invoices, bill, book keep and make collections”, Partner Mr. Silas Zhu stated in the interview.

Currently, the commercial robot technology applied in the financial sector is focused on simulating human financial operations and judgements with an extensive application space in terms of business revenue prediction, risk control and management, fraud analysis, tax optimization.

Adopting robotic automation technology to take the place of people and relieve them of these mechanically repetitive work for further releasing human productivity enables people to complete works in need of brain, including more creative, challenging and strategic issues gaining more value improvements. Robotic processing tends to be over 15 times of the fastest speed of human employees and the robots can provide 24/7 service without a break, taking over nearly 80% rule-based processes, which makes it a super employee. 98% of enterprises’ IT leaders believe business process automation is critical to drive the business interests.

We are imaginative towards technologies with full respect. Enterprises’ transformation of artificial intelligence will commence with the application of RPA technology. We have focused on its development and committed to helping clients transfer the technology into the new engine of enterprise internal management and new energy for external growth and ultimately drive the innovation of business and management models by starting with our financial service robots.