Former Baidu fintech unit Du Xiaoman Financial says that artificial intelligence will lie at the core of upcoming fintech innovations. Speaking at the Baidu AI Developers Conference on 4 July,Du Xiaoman CEO Zhu Guang (朱光) said that finance was the most rapid channel for achieving commercialisation of AI technology. According to Zhu over the past two and half years Du Xiaoman has already applied AI technology to multiple areas including smart client canvassing, personal identification, big data risk control and smart investment and advisory. "We believe that the application of AI technology in the financial sphere has already left the laboratory phase, and officially entered the standardised application phase," said Zhu. In the area of risk control Duman is using online data in combination with central bank credit data, real-time data and conventional methods to greatly raise risk-control efficiency, while the company's facial recognition technology has achieved a success rate of over 98%, with a response time of just several dozen milliseconds.