Artificial Intelligence comes to the rescue of banks

The Indian banking sector is beginning to adopt AI (artificial intelligence) quite aggressively for both the back-office and customer facing purposes. According to a data provided by RBI, among state run banks in India, PNB topped in the number of loan fraud cases across India with 389 cases over the last five financial years. After the infamous bank fraud that the country witnessed this year, Punjab National Bank (PNB) on May 6, announced its plans to rely on AI for reconciliation of accounts and incorporate analytics for improving the audit systems as it seeks to clean up the process and counter fraud in the near future. This decision was taken after the biggest bank fraud in which two junior officers at a single branch had illegally steered USD 1.77 billion (Euro 1.43 billion) in fraudulent loans to companies, controlled by Nirav Modi and his uncle Mehul Choksi. PNB managing director Sunil Mehta said in a statement that, "The'business remodelling' brought alive by changes at PNB is essential to ensure that the bank continues to grow and compete with its peers better," and elaborated on several steps that would reduce human intervention.