NSF's financial staff developed an artificial intelligence application called the Financial Obligation Root Cause Explorer, or FORCE.

The two-day 21st Malaysian Finance Association Conference 2019 held at Sunway University was one of the most important finance research conferences in Malaysia. The conference provided an open platform for scholars and practitioners in the field to meet and share their current research as well as to exchange ideas and information on new developments in the areas of finance and economics. The conference was officially launched by Professor Catherine Ho Soke Fun, Malaysian Finance Association President; Professor Graeme Wilkinson, Sunway University Vice-Chancellor, and Chong Chang Choong, Sunway Group Chief Financial Officer. Chong in his opening address said, "We live in a digital age where internet and technology have become a big part of our lives. The rapid advancement of technology is transforming the workplace and the world, including the financial sector. Fintech or financial technology, is now no longer a peculiar term. The ever-evolving Fintech services are beginning to be adopted by the tech-savvy and sophisticated consumers of today."

Innovation is good; financial innovation is bad. It gave us the global financial crisis, after all, along with multibillion-dollar bailouts for entities such as AIG Financial Products, which almost nobody had heard of before they suddenly turned out to pose a mortal threat to the entire economy. That said, there are two financial innovations that are generally considered to have been clearly positive for society. One is the ATM, for reasons which should be self-explanatory. The other is passive investing.

African Business Review: Tell me a little about your role with Econet Wireless Zimbabwe. I have extensive experience in IT networks, telecom services, and the financial technology space, now exploring artificial intelligence to add value to myself and add to my skills, as machine learning is the future of every business and technology of today. I sit in a very key position to oversee the entire changing landscape of the financial IT i.e. fintech services sector. In our previous issue of African Business Review, you discussed the challenge that banking and financial organisations face in trying to keep costs low while ensuring the same high quality of services - is this still the case? Keeping costs low is the prime idea, as this is a low margin business for low value transactions, if the cost at any time starts looking north, customers immediately start running south.

During a half-hour interval on May 6, 2010, stock prices for some of the largest companies in the world dropped precipitously, some to just pennies a share. Then, just as suddenly and inexplicably, shares recovered to their pre-crash prices. This unprecedented event, burned into the memories of investors and regulators alike, is now known as the Flash Crash. Since that day, financial markets have seen flash crashes in US Treasury securities, foreign currencies, and exchange-traded funds (ETFs). Other puzzling, system-wide glitches are becoming more frequent as well.