Gartner, Inc. has announced the winners of the 2019 Gartner Eye on Innovation Award for financial services in the Americas. The award recognizes innovative use of digital technology-enabled capabilities, products or services to highlight “best-in-class” financial industry initiatives launched within the past 12 months and to offer insight about developments in digital innovation.
The finalists presented their case studies during Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo, which is taking place here through Thursday, and Travelers was selected as the regional 2019 Gartner Eye on Innovation Award Americas winner by the attendees at the event. Banco Bradesco S.A. and Bank of America were also named as winners.
Regional Winner:
Travelers — Travelers set out to find a new way to expedite the process associated with detecting total losses from wildfires, an increasingly prevalent issue in the western United States. The company helped form a consortium of insurers to create the Geospatial Intelligence Center (GIC), an entity devoted to collecting high-resolution aerial imagery of properties across the U.S. Using imagery from previous California wildfires, Travelers tapped into its property boundary data to isolate home locations in the pictures. It then crowdsourced the tagging of total losses across 40,000 images to provide the data for a deep learning model. Finally, the team leveraged convolutional neural networks to analyze thousands of images of damaged and undamaged homes to immediately assess which properties were total losses. By providing damage assessment sooner, Travelers was able to provide reimbursement for home losses in just a few weeks, allowing customers to more quickly begin recovering and rebuilding their properties.
Additional Award Recipients:
Banco Bradesco S.A. — A new regulatory wave around the opening of financial data has led to the rise of Open Banking. As its own Open Banking initiative, Banco Bradesco S.A. developed the MEI Portal, in partnership with startups from its open innovation program. The MEI Portal provides free resources and consultancy to micro-entrepreneurs, helping in the opening, development, maintenance and growth stages for new companies. The solution resulted in a significant increase in customer loyalty and opportunities for new business for the bank, showcased by an 81% growth in MEI openings and more than 1.5 million pageviews to the portal.
Bank of America — Bankers across the world have traditionally relied on anecdotal research to identify investors likely to participate in an initial public offering (IPO) based on investor relationships, recollection of previous deal participation and knowledge of the landscape. Bank of America developed its Predictive Intelligence Analytics Machine (PRIAM) to help maximize demand for equity capital market transactions by predicting the investors most likely to participate in a deal. PRIAM provides bankers with investor recommendations based on statistical data analysis spanning more than 50,000 historical orders and hundreds of other data points, equipping bankers with meaningful scientific analysis they can incorporate into their strategy to best serve clients. Since its launch, PRIAM has accurately predicted the top 30 participants in a deal with more than 70% accuracy.
Finalists:
AXA XL — Faced with limited IT budgets and staffing resources, many small and midsize businesses (SMBs) are still lacking in the critical area of cybersecurity. AXA XL identified an opportunity to provide strategic value to SMBs through a partnership with Slice Labs to create an on-demand, pay-as-you-go cyber insurance product. The cloud-based cyber insurance policy includes coverage for data protection and privacy risks, both for third-party claims and first-party mitigation costs. The coverage also provides protection for cyber extortion threats and other breach-related liabilities, including regulatory penalties. This solution has significantly expedited cyber insurance purchasing times, resulting in a 98% reduction in procurement time and a 93% reduction in work time.
Bancolombia — Bancolombia has committed to developing and implementing a digital workforce in which human, robotic and cognitive capabilities are combined to enhance working conditions and customer experiences. Using robotic process automation (RPA) and robotic desktop automation (RDA) solutions, the bank augments processes for more than 10,000 people from its various branches. To manage this digital workforce, Bancolombia developed a tool called NAZAR, which monitors the execution of implemented automation solutions. NAZAR performs monitoring tasks automatically, showing relevant alerts based on a traffic light system to detect anomalies during process execution. The implementation of RPA/RDA solutions monitored by NAZAR has resulted in more than 64,000 hours saved, a 20% increase in sales and a 58.8% improvement in customer service time.
Bank of America — Bank of America identified the need for a digital solution to help its clients understand, manage and improve their finances. In response, the bank developed Erica — an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven, virtual financial assistant that is available 24/7 via the Bank of America mobile app. Erica employs the latest technology in AI, predictive analytics and natural language processing to deliver personalization at scale. Bank of America has integrated more than 400,000 unique ways of asking Erica financial questions to help ensure the solution provides the most useful information. Since completing the client launch, Erica has helped more than 7.6 million users complete more than 55 million requests.
Comerica Bank — Comerica Bank leveraged virtual reality (VR) technology as a learning tool to improve its employee training process. The bank hosted a fully immersive VR training experience, providing an open invitation to employees at major campus locations. Those who attended wore a VR headset and were presented with a simulated active shooter training scenario, using hand controllers to run, hide and fight in three different scenarios. The VR system’s CPU was attached to large screen monitors so others in the room could watch the participants. As a result, in a post-training survey, 88% of participants agreed that immersive training through VR would be a valuable addition to the bank’s training regimen, and 83% of participants said they find VR training more effective than traditional classroom training.
Liberty Mutual Insurance — Liberty Mutual Insurance built a system called the Quantum platform, which enables the rapid creation and deployment of insurance products without IT intervention by driving reuse across jurisdictions, business lines and stages of the value chain. Subject matter experts (SMEs) configure their own products in a digital-first manner on the platform, which fully integrates supporting functions such as underwriting, quoting, proposal generation and document generation. As configuration is performed directly by SMEs, successive implementation and quality assurance phases can be eliminated. The change in methodology enabled by Quantum has improved time to market by two to six times, while reducing the cost to introduce new product types and virtually eliminating marginal implementation costs for new states.
Morgan Stanley — With the proliferation of algorithmic trading, markets react quickly to analyst stock recommendations, price target changes and earnings revisions. However, as language is more difficult for computers to process than data, most quantitative trading strategies ignore text in sell-side research. Morgan Stanley used deep learning and natural language processing techniques to study text in research reports and develop a trading strategy based on how machines read analysts’ sentiment. For 41,758 company research reports spanning six years, Morgan Stanley’s model produces a score reflecting how confident the artificial intelligence was that the analyst was bullish or bearish on the stock. Scores are then overlaid with revised price targets to capture critical market-moving events and provide opportunities for entering the market. This technique has been shown to significantly enhance returns for Morgan Stanley’s customers by up to 9.6%.
