MONEY 20/20: What is the Role of AI in FinTech? with Abrigo's Chief Product Officer Ravikumar Nemalikanti

Will AI take over your job in the next few years? Will AI improve coding and surveillance threats? Learn from Abrigo, a company supporting dozens of thousands of regional US Banks.

In late October, our journalist CryptoQuile sat down with Abrigo Chief Product Officer, Ravikumar Nemalikanti at the Money 20/20 Conference. In the extensive interview cut, they discussed AI's role in Fintech.

Let’s go!

---

There are ways you are using to improve the efficiencies of the security processes you offer your clients when bridging between crypto and banking. Can you speak to any of those?

Yes, one of the things that we're working on is how to arm every BSA analyst with their own system that they can use to see the alerts, score the alerts, write a narrative for the alerts using generative AI, and give them a better start so they're processing,

Let's say we receive five alerts a day. How can we increase that to twenty, and how can we 4x or 5x that efficiency? 

We've been focused on this, and it involves using AI, both traditional Machine Learning and generative AI. So we're giving them something to start with because every alert needs to be written up so somebody reviews it and says AI. That's one thing that we're working on. 

We are also working on the origination side. For instance, it will help harmonize finance and banking efforts. You could track smart money movements more easily, and organizations could also weigh their liabilities better.

Where do you see the landscape of AI in your industry? Is Abrigo fearful of what could happen? Everybody thinks of these doomsday scenarios and that AI could potentially be one of them. Is Abrigo on the side that likes this technology? Where do you guys stand?

We are very bullish on AI technology, but if you think about banking in general, 2023, speaking from memory a little bit, I think our US GDP was, what, 26 trillion? And about 8%, I think, came from banking and financial services. And if you fast-forward the next five to ten years, every industrial research paper that's been put out there was being published, talking about maybe injecting three to five percent in GDP directly attributable to AI. We're talking about trillions. 

Are we excited? Absolutely, because that's our core measure. Again, how can banks be more efficient? I think there is a general concern about jobs. What will happen to jobs? What will happen to some roles and functions? I think that that will happen naturally to what we believe in. This has become quite rhetorical, but in banks, employees who start to use AI will be more efficient and will be really valued at any of the institutions. 

For example, I run an engineering team. I can see engineers using AI assistants to write code faster and develop products faster. They are the ones producing the best right now. I think we'll see the same thing in finances. But is there an existential threat to the workforce in the next ten years? I would bet not because AI is one of those foundational technologies that I think will try a fundamental reimagination of how we perform and how organizations are designed.

 It's going to take time. And if history is any witness, going back to bear with me here. The steam engine –– There wasn't an immediate productivity increase because all the factories were suddenly equipped with steam engines, and they had to rewire all the factory functions and how they scale. With AI, all of that must be reimagined, which will take time. By then, we'll also figure out how to work with this foundational technology. So we are very bullish, and it will create a lot of value for backing the financial institutions.