Gartner, Inc. has announced the winners of the 2019 Gartner Eye on Innovation Award for financial services in the Asia/Pacific region. The award recognizes innovative use of digital technology-enabled capabilities, products or services, in order 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 until Thursday. Taishin International Bank Co., Ltd (Taiwan) was selected as the regional 2019 Gartner Eye on Innovation Award Asia Pacific winner by the attendees at the event. Commonwealth Bank of Australia (Australia) and CTBC Bank (Taiwan) were also named as award recipients.Regional Winner :

Taishin International Bank Co., Ltd (Taiwan) – With the popularity of ATMs around Taiwan, Taishin Bank developed a Facial Recognition Project, which combines biometric technologies to offer services such as Face ID-enabled withdrawals with assurance. This resolves the problem of stolen ATM cards and unauthorized withdrawals. In addition, facial recognition technology also identifies the bank’s wealth management customers when they enter a branch, enabling a more personalized and immediate service. After launch, the project reported a substantial increase in the amount of Face-ID accounts set up by customers and cash withdrawals. This boosts ATM usage significantly and enhances branch stickiness.

Additional Award Recipients :

Commonwealth Bank of Australia (Australia) – In a global first, the bank launched ‘Benefits Finder’ to help customers track down unclaimed benefits, rebates and concession payments and claim what they are entitled to. This new feature in the CommBank app connects customers to more than 250 potential benefits. It uses a unique, multi-disciplinary team of behavioral economists, data science, digital delivery, UX, strategy and academic partners. The bank estimates over A$150 million will be delivered annually to customers once fully scaled. Significant uptake has occurred since December 2018 after targeted messages were sent to more than 2.2 million customers, resulting in up to A$40 million in claims.

CTBC Bank (Taiwan) – The bank developed Smart KYC to establish an efficient Know Your Customer (KYC) validation standard globally, providing a single and holistic view on each customer and their dealings with the bank. It also provides consolidated customer information in connect with each anti-money laundering (AML) contact point, and reduces reliance on manual investigations and decision-making by rules-based scenarios. Smart KYC incorporates biometric verifications, facial recognition, object detection, smart process automation and Pluto, an AI platform concentrating on text data processing and clustering. The bank has decreased unnecessary KYC data collection times and shortened new customer onboarding by 5 to 7 days.

Finalists :

CITIC aiBank Corporation Limited (China) – The internet bank developed an AI Application Creation Platform to significantly lower AI application thresholds, enabling anyone to create intelligent applications. With nine built-in AI application abilities, users can ensure the delivery of end-to-end intelligent application to multiple terminal channels (H5, intelligent speaker, App, applet and telephone) by designing, training and releasing, without the need to know AI algorithms.

E.SUN Commercial Bank Ltd. (Taiwan) – With increasing machine learning (ML) projects and models developed by the bank, it designed and implemented ML as a Service (MLaaS) to address the challenges associated with delivering and managing these services. MLaaS is a platform which empowers all existing and even legacy systems with ML capabilities via lightweight API calls. Risk management, marketing, data center management, market forecasting and customer services are now able to exploit ML in various decision support and automation mechanisms. MLaaS also serves as a gateway for providing open banking APIs to the outside world. The bank expects to provide more than 50 APIs on MLaaS to both internal and external systems by the end of 2019.

Iffco Tokio General Insurance Company Limited (India) – The general insurance company developed an AI-based Quick Claim Settlement (QCS) scheme to settle damaged car claims within 15 minutes of customers’ accepting offers. Customers upload documents, photographs and videos of damaged cars to a self-service mobile application. Damage is assessed within seconds using AI, streamlining a process that was tediously manual. The settlement cycle time has been reduced from six days to 10 minutes. Aside from removing the need for a claims surveyor, ITGI has been able to save approximately 33 percent on each of the claims processed.

Ping An Life Insurance Company of China, Ltd (China) – The insurance provider introduced its “Insurance Agent Intelligent Management Program” in 2018 for millions of agents in each of its branches. The program uses AI technologies to manage the career development of its insurance agents online, handling their interviews, training and business development. The program has demonstrated the productivity of its agents has greatly improved and has received a five-star praise rate up to 94 percent. It has also drastically cut financial costs by more than 600 million yuan, significantly contributing to the growth of the company.

SBI Card (India) – The payment solutions provider launched ILA, an AI platform with natural language processing (NLP), ML, big data analytics and robotic process automation (RPA), to provide actionable insights for customers. These insights are delivered as next best actions, personalized offers, retargeting missed sales, upsell and service opportunities. Over the last 12 months, more than five million customers have interacted with ILA; more than 15 million customer queries have been resolved with 98 percent success rate; more than 15,000 hours per month have been saved using RPA, with efforts reallocated to execute upskilled tasks; and more.

WeBank (China) – The bank launched a digitalised Micro-and-Small Enterprise (MSE) Loan initiative, which is a crucial milestone in its strategy to drive inclusive finance as the first digital only bank in China. Innovative technologies introduced include identity authentication (biometric recognition and anti-fraud solutions); fraud detection ML and risk control AI algorithms; loan collection robotics; e-arbitration with an extended blockchain application for smart debt recovery; and a big data risk model. By June 2019, more than 500,000 MSEs in 200 cities applied for a WeBank MSE loan, while more than 120,000 companies received a credit line.

Award submissions were assessed using a robust and dynamic framework to ensure that the assessment process is pertinent and objective. The Gartner Awards Framework (GAF) is used as a structured model of assessment that enables participating organizations to be benchmarked against world-class performance standards. The GAF consists of specialized assessment modules pertaining to the evaluation criteria for each of the submissions. The criteria and subcriteria provide a robust set of requirements that are used as the methodology for benchmarking and learning among the participating organizations.

Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo : 

Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo 2019 is the world’s most important gathering of CIOs and other IT executives. IT executives rely on these events to gain insight into how their organizations can use IT to overcome business challenges and improve operational efficiency. 

Upcoming dates and locations for Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo include :

November 3-7: Barcelona

November 11-14: Goa

November 12-14: Tokyo

March 2-4, 2020: Dubai

May 11-14, 2020: Toronto