Making a Giant Leap in the Banking and Financial Services Industry with AI and Machine Learning: FINBOTS AI Solution Pte Ltd

With the evolution of global technology over the years, the value of machine learning and artificial intelligence is becoming more apparent day by day. Though the banking and financial industry has been a bit conservative for the adoption of new technologies, ML and AI is now a common phrase. As banks and other financial institutions strive to boost up their security, improve financial analysis and streamline processes, ML and AI have now become the technology of choice.

In the view of the above mentioned, it is indeed a pleasure to introduce FINBOTS AI Solution Pte Ltd, a technology firm based in Singapore that focuses on AI, Data Science, RPA and Machine Learning for Banking and Financial Services industry. The firm takes pride in its integrated approach to intelligent automation and offers strategic consulting, implementation and delivery services for robotic process automation for the industry.

In conversation with the thought leader, CEO Bala Iyer

What were the challenges that you had to go through initially while building your business? How did you overcome them?

We had to deal with majorly two challenges. The first was to compete against bigger companies, and the other being spending our own cash as compared to funded POC. When we started out, there were already established players in the field with better engineers and workforce. But we were persistent with our approach and our efforts, and we successfully convinced our clients of the innovation that could happen faster in a smaller organization.

Now, in our journey so far, we have reached a stage where our clients are funding our Prototypes and POCs which was a little bit harder to get in the beginning.

Between ever-changing network, system, and application needs, many leaders don’t know what they really have even when they think they do. How do you manage to serve the needs of highly volatile market and stay relevant to the consumer interests and needs?

We offer two competitive advantages to serve the needs of our target clients.

• Solution designing – Thinking through the solution first.
• Prototype POC stage – Our clients have a working prototype model giving clarity around.

What do you think is the next big thing in technology?

From what we have observed, predictive intelligence is quite trending in the market. There are solutions that can bring data together and machine learning techniques to bring suggestive prediction.

A tech company needs to be very agile with product and service innovation in order to withstand the competition. What is your approach towards developing innovative products and services?

We offer the following services to cover up all your needs.

• COMPARISENSE- Comparisense extracts data from different types of annual reports and generates summary reports and graphs along with a quick commentary on significant moves in performance.
• RM ASSIST- RM Assist takes Relationship Manager and client relations to the next level. It will bring client interactions to the bank’s system and will give the banks unique cross selling opportunities through neural networks and intelligent clustering.
• FINANCIAL MARKET ANALYSTS REPORT- Financial Markets Analysts Report extracts data from emails and generates analyst reports with accumulated data elements.
• ACCOUNTS PAYABLE- Accounts Payable gives the client a seamless execution of invoice processing with high degree of accuracy.
• NEWS FEED GATHERING- News Feed Gathering is capable of extracting, interpreting, structuring, enhancing and summarizing key financial data from unstructured real time data.
• CREDIT DECISIONING- Credit decisioning system will accelerate your credit appraisal process through Machine Learning algorithms and provide you with a single customer view and Dashboards.
• INTELLIGENT OCR- Intelligent OCR will be able to extract data from scanned images and even handwritten text through Deep Learning algorithms and cross referencing with a high degree of confidence.

If you must list down a few factors that have contributed a great deal in your success, what would they be?

Our perseverance, innovative thinking and going the extra mile helped us take our company to the level that it is current at.

Most of the tech companies invest more than reasonable part of their profits in R&D, which sometimes is not a better option. What is your approach in keeping your company standing?

Our biggest take on that is to produce something to sell. Instead of investing too much on developing a complete product, we go through the Prototype (a minimum viable product) route.

Customer service varies, but companies can still be successful. How do you maintain your customers’ trust and loyalty?

The biggest value that we bring to the table is transparency. We discuss with clients the cost and efforts openly. This is the area which often comes up with our client, whereby we suggest that we will do a paid assessment as compared to an assessment to win the deal.

Very often this assessment suggests that the solution can be done using current tools available within the clients whereby our competitors would suggest to on-board a new set of tools. Our clients love this transparency.

What do you feel are the reasons behind your company’s reputation?

The biggest reason is transparency. What comes next is our innovative thought process on how we incorporate different solutions. Our team is good in putting different solutions and integrating seamlessly.

We also have a domain specialist, a team of banking and logistics industry specialist who often help to re-imagine the process.

The Man behind the Plan

Bala Iyer, CEO

In a rich career spanning 22 years in leading banks across Singapore, Tokyo, London and Johannesburg; Bala has been instrumental in bringing innovation to product control, valuation control, CFO function, treasury - capital and liquidity Management. Throughout his career he has led various teams, building transformation strategy and thought leadership in re-imagining processes.

Bala is an FCCA, Masters in Applied Finance from Singapore Management University.

“FINBOTS offers an ideal set of comprehensive technological ‘Solutions-as-a-Service’ to cover all your finance needs and achieve your vision by leveraging the best-in-class solutions to gain a competitive edge.”