[SINGAPORE] Banks are ramping up their use of artificial intelligence (AI), and DBS – which has earned S$750 million through its use of the technology – estimates that its economic value could surpass S$1 billion this year.
Since the bank began focusing on AI, it has created more than 350 use cases and has 1,500 models in production, said Rajeev Hassamal, DBS’ head of generative AI and flow of work, at SuperAI Singapore, a two-day conference being held at Sands Expo and Convention Centre.
The conference participants at the event discussed, however, the challenges in striking a balance between innovation and responsible use of AI when developing AI models.
“Finding that sweet spot is very hard,” said Hassamal.
Speaking at a panel discussion on the integration between AI and finance, he emphasised the importance of equipping employees, regardless of role, with an understanding of how the technology works.
“We need to ensure people understand how to use this technology,” said Hassamal, who showcased DBS’ internal generative AI chatbot, DBS-GPT, which helps its employees with content generation and writing tasks, all within a secure environment.
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Speaking at a separate panel, Sambit Sahu, vice-president of applied research at Capital One, noted that the AI and machine-learning space has completely changed over the past five years.
Large language models have progressed from doing simple tasks, to taking a more agentic approach, he said. One use case of AI, he suggested, is in mimicking employees’ tasks, but it does it more efficiently.
“(Banks) deal with huge amounts of data, text, images, audio and also visuals,” he noted.
Sigrid Rouam, chief AI officer at EFG Bank, pointed out that generative AI can also be put to work on compliance-related tasks, such as checking the source of money from a bank’s clients.
AI can also assist with non-advisory related tasks – those that take up 70 per cent of relationship managers’ time, she said.
“All of this should be completely automated and streamlined.”
The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) warned that guardrails need to be in place amid the race to implement AI in the financial sector.
Kenneth Gay, MAS’ chief fintech officer, said the central bank takes regulation very seriously, given that the regard for regulation is a competitive advantage for Singapore.
Project MindForge, an initiative by the MAS in 2023, examined the risks and opportunities of generative AI for banks.
Gay said that since financial institutions are at the stage of building and deploying generative AI applications, they are seeking more clarity from the government about the sort of specific features that should be included.
He said MAS intends to release a playbook this year that will give institutions from across the segments of the financial sectors, including banking and insurance, more clarity regarding the key risk considerations across AI’s key use cases.
