But there is no doubt that the pandemic has hastened the adoption of emerging digital technologies, ushered in a new era of remote and flexible working arrangements, increased organisations' reliance on digital infrastructure and exposed our tech-related strengths and weaknesses alike. Leaving 2020 in the rear-view mirror, we count down our top 10 predictions for 2021 and beyond in the domain of Digital Law in Australia. Despite an existing principles-based framework for the protection of privacy under the Privacy Act, in recent years the Federal Government has preferred to introduce parallel privacy requirements, such as the 13 Privacy Safeguards under the Consumer Data Right legislation and the privacy aspects of the upcoming Data Availability and Transparency Act for Government agencies. These nascent regimes are similar enough to the existing privacy regime to encourage complacency and different enough to give any compliance function a headache. Overlapping and often sectorial regulation adds to the increasing complexity of privacy law in Australia.

Covid-19 has catalysed financial services organisations to harness Artificial Intelligence (AI) to improve customer experience (CX), says a report published by the Capgemini Research Institute. However, financial services firms' implementation of AI at scale is the lowest across all industries, and where AI has been deployed, there are still some customer expectations that are not being met -- with half of the customers saying they receive no value from AI-enabled interactions. The report, titled, Smart Money: How to drive AI at scale to transform the financial services customer experience, revealed that the deployment of AI to improve the overall CX has grown significantly in the financial services industry in the past three years. Nine in ten (94 per cent) organisations say that improving customer experience is the key objective behind launching new AI-enabled initiatives. Just over half of customers (51 per cent) have daily AI-enabled interactions (like talking to a chatbot) with banking and insurance firms.

Financial services organisations that have adopted artificial intelligence (AI) expect to see a 41% improvement in competitiveness within three years, according to a new study by Microsoft Asia and IDC Asia-Pacific. More than half (52%) of the financial services organisations in Asia-Pacific have already started on their AI journeys. This is higher than the average of 41% for all industries, indicating the sector is more advanced than others in the region. The findings are contained in "Future Ready Business: Assessing Asia-Pacific's Growth with AI". "The digital economy has resulted in demands for organisations to reinvent themselves to remain relevant to their customers," said Connie Leung, senior director and financial services business lead with Microsoft Asia.

Recent advances in Artificial Intelligence are creating huge opportunities for process improvement in the Financial Sector but do have some challenges. The financial services industry in Australia has not been without it's challenges in the last few years. Downward moving real-estate and investment markets in Australia, increased competition from global players and the recent high degree of inspection and intervention from Australian regulators has forced Financial Services companies to on the one hand focus more on customer service and doing the "right thing' for their customers. Whilst on the other hand this same environment is pushing these same companies to deploy new technologies to improve costs and to increase efficiencies to offset the additional burdens that new regulation is bringing. In an era of big data with large volumes of transactions the deployment of AI represents an opportunity for Financial Services organisations to improve their operations through increased cost efficiencies whilst at the same time providing better services to their customers.

AI serves the business so the business must first work out why it would want AI. AI can and should augment data analytics on which financial services businesses are now fully engaged, so applying AI can be a natural enhancement of what is already going on. It follows that the pathways can be quite similar, although the technologies deployed may be quite different. AI can offer many benefits to help tackle the main challenges financial institutions face today. All four main areas of attention that the industry now faces, in customer experience, trust and compliance, business reinvention and operational excellence, highlight specific issues or opportunities where one of the AI technologies can offer value.

Forget siloed quant teams, overworked developers or the superiority of the human mind, there's one big impediment to artificial intelligence really taking off in financial services – the current staff. If AI is to gain traction in financial services, it will need to vanquish the army of financial services professionals standing in its way. At least, this is the conclusion of Raffaele Savi, a managing director and head of developed markets within BlackRock's scientific active equities team. "People are problematic, machines are easy," he said, speaking at the Newsweek conference on artificial intelligence and big data last week. "People who understand finance and economics don't think the same way as people who know a lot about computing and machine learning. We need to work together as an industry. AI is where the bulk of alpha will be on a longer term horizon."

As financial services organisations predict and plan for the way consumers will manage their money in the future, artificial intelligence (AI) is high on the business development strategy for 2016 and beyond, says Gideon Hyde from design consultancy Market Gravity. The co-founder shares his thoughts on the emerging technology and explains how businesses can embrace AI to enhance their offerings, meet consumer demand for speed, personalisation and convenience, and launch new products and services to stand out in the competitive marketplace. AI is already around us and used every day within payments, money management and for robo-advice, particularly in the area of intelligent digital assistants that handle regular customer service enquiries and tasks. It can process'big data' far more efficiently than humans and can recognise speech, images, text, patterns of online behaviour, for example to detect fraud as well as appropriate advertisements for upselling. Smart machines and technology can turn data into customer insights and enhance service provisions, bringing the digital experience closer to the human interaction for consumers.