Why banks are betting smart money on AI in bid to stay on top

In an industry that is progressing at a blistering speed, finance's only option to stay on top of the game is with AI, reducing the roles humans have played for centuries. Unless you've been hiding under a rock for the past two years, you would have seen the bedlam surrounding the stratospheric rise of cryptocurrency. This is particularly relevant with bitcoin, going from something at the fringe of fintech to the mainstream as every person and their dog suddenly considered investing in a real unknown quantity. While its long-term existence remains to be seen, the continued interest has shown that traditional banks and the latest start-ups have identified that the old ways of turning up to a branch, or even using an ATM, could be the banking equivalent of watching a movie on VHS. In its place comes a raft of new technologies, none more so apparent than the one that promises to not only shake up how customers interact with their banks, but how banks fundamentally operate: artificial intelligence (AI). From an outsider's perspective, the most obvious sign of AI's role in the change of banking is part of the overall digitisation of the traditional bank, whereby instead of dealing with physical branches or human tellers, you operate largely online, particularly through mobile.