Robin Raskin interviews Sophia
Sophia is the brainchild of Hanson Robotics. Made of hundreds of sensors, a rubbery skin that makes her look like a cross between Sophia Loren and the all-star lineup in Disney World's Hall of Presidents, Sophia is more than just a pretty face. She interacts. She learns. She has expressive facial expressions. And she could easily be applying for the next bank teller job at your local branch.
To make his point that AI is gearing up quickly to enter the financial mainstream, Martin Haring, CMO at Finastra, a large fintech company, palled around with Sophia evangelizing the coming of robos and AI to the financial world.
Of course, A and I may be the most overused combination of two letters in the English language. For the banking industry, AI can mean anything from a having a robochat with an automated bank teller, a computer that learns about its customers as it amalgamates data, or a neural network of decision-making intelligent machines that can begin to make inferences and deductions based on data.
I caught up with Martin Häring and Sophia, each promoting their version of future banking. Sophia won on the coolness factor, but her answers to the same questions I asked Martin made her seem like she was on robo-auto pilot. Regardless of what I asked her, her answers stayed quasi on topic, and were filled with canned remarks about the future of robots and humans as compatriots.
Facing encroachment from everywhere -- fintechs, cryptocurrency, blockchain, and regulators, Häring was much more eloquent on creating the case for urgency. It’s time for banks to move into the digital age or close up shop.
Häring calls for an open banking infrastructure where banks would band together to co-innovate and collaborate. He’s pushing for what he calls platformication, the bundling together of financial services into one neat platform, that will help consumers navigate through the maze of offerings and products today’s banks make available. And not to throw the baby out with the bathwater he believes that banks can use new application protocols (APIs) and user interfaces to mask the ugly underbelly of legacy code that most banks run on today.
To give you a taste of tomorrow’s banking today, here’s a snippet of conversation between Sophia and me. Clearly Sophia is the more composed of the two.