Overseas Citizens, Financial Services and Passports-Designing AI Transformation with Matthew Lamons

Overseas citizens are a key consituent from a banking and financial services point of view. They are uniquely reliant on a single credential and travel document-the passport. Matthew Lamons and I have been discussing the importance of the passport and how it’s unique functions deserve a closer look for transformation. The passport is an all-important travel document for citizens of any country. It declares the credentials of the citizen across borders, provides the right to cross frontiers and gives home country diplomats the ability to render assistance. This also means that the passport office has a dual architecture. One is the citizen or customer facing process and the other is the back-office. The back-office may be integrated with other branches of government as well as entities in other countries which cooperate to one another on international travel. Passports are valuable and highly sensitive and historically have been prone to forgery and theft, though this has declined significantly with the advent of digitization, encryption and sharing of information.  They are also the means by which overseas citizens can seek more facilities back home including opening bank accounts as well as investing into financial products. 

While one may surmise that a passport office has a fairly business-as-usual set of tasks, the truth is probably more complicated. Diplomatic services, of which this is an integral part, face unique challenges today. As citizens travel and live more and more worldwide, they need assistance wherever they are. This includes issuance of passports to family members who live overseas, renewal of expiring documents, regular consular services and handling loss of documents due to theft. Secondly, emergency assistance upon being stranded due to extreme weather events, war and other sudden scenarios need diplomats to respond rapidly and often in hostile environments. Thirdly, in a world of cyberattacks, the departmental back-office has to protect valuable data. There is opportunity here as well. The data collected by the passport office is enormous and varied. The most interesting aspect of this data is the context of generation and collection. For governments, it can yield rich insights into how citizens behave in specific contexts, what their expectations and needs are and above all, how they respond to the delivery of benefits from their own governments. Without being in breach of established privacy laws, it is reasonable to assume that government-owned or controlled financial institutions can orchestrate product offerings to their overseas fellow citizens. These may include remittance, wealth, savings as well as asset ownership plans.

The harnessing of this opportunity and meeting the challenges mentioned here has to happen within a macro-environment of fast-changing human behavior. An individual today is used to round the clock, ubiquitous access. The availability of convenient travel allows him or her to go farther than even before and move faster. He or she may respond in varying ways to the influence of subcultures exposed to or groups one is a part of. Citizens today are used to an elaborate device ecosystem within which they expect the efficient delivery of digital services. For instance, one can look at their interaction with e-commerce and how it has evolved. Similarly, individuals and collectives of individuals have long carved out their space online as gamers. The implications of these developments are not only about how they behave online. Governments have to take into account the shifts in their attitudes, interests and opinions as part of groups where interdependency and influence are very high and where context of consumption matters a lot. In other words, the way benefits have to be delivered to end-users need to change to maximize effectiveness.

This is where we believe that relevant transformation of Passport Office functions may be considered. Given below are some areas where this transformation may be planned and implemented.

1. Engagement-We submit that the fundamental building block of engagement between the Passport Office and citizens could be an always-available service that goes beyond providing pre-configured answers, is not bound by the office hours of the department and provides an experience that is interactive, responsive and intuitive. Today, most commercial organizations and many government departments use chatbots. However, these chatbots are pre-configured to provide certain pre-determined answers as well as deliver standard manuals or FAQs. Irrespective of utility, these are limited by their inability to be responsive to the unstructured manner in which questions are asked by citizens and their wide range of requests. While Robotic Process Automation (RPA) had been highlighted as a means to improve interaction, it’s swift decline in the face of AI and the migration of large RPA firms are ample evidence that the offering has been short-lived. We believe that any question-however structured-should receive a cogent answer and a solution. A citizen calls a passport office helpline or sends a message in order to get very specific assistance. Owing to the nature of the document involved, this may well result in complexities and repeated iterations. It is essential that these iterations should not point citizens to usual FAQs. Instead, the brain of the service, if you will, must be able to provide proper guidance. The brain is the machine learning platform that is first trained to work in a query-response scenario and further, is able to get trained further with more data being ingested from interactions at the front end. It is designed to analyze queries, process these and then provide answers on its own. As it learns continuously, the platform is able to become more intuitive and responsive with time. If needed, it can route a call to an officer. In this regard, it is important to note that we do not propose replacing officers and other staff. It is expected that they will be answering phones during their own work hours and as per protocol, there may be duty officers available to provide consular assistance. Legacy information technology platforms render services to the organization (in this case, the passport office) through pre-designed data calls and pre-configured responses. Functional tasks are possible today. But the ML platform goes much further as it is first trained before deployment and then continues to learn as it works. The learning or training remains supervised to prevent biases or hallucinations creeping in. However, the machine is still provided a considerable amount of autonomy.
2. Medium of engagement-We believe that citizens of a country with a rich literary and oral tradition and with deep pride in their language, should be able to interact with any system on the side of the passport office in their mother tongue. Naturally, there are some practical limitations to this. Nevertheless, the platform would be trained to comprehend and respond with multiple languages. This would be the case for both voice and text. It is important that the assurance of a voice-enabled service reaches citizens in the language of their choice. This is also a necessity for those who are impaired due to eye problems.
3. Reducing routine load on diplomats and officers- It is likely that a lot of work in the passport office is repetitive. Some of it may be internal administrative tasks while others might have to do with routine processes regarding passports and consular services. We suggest that significant costs savings and efficiency improvement may take place due to the generative side of artificial intelligence that the platform can undertake. Creating standard memos, letters and emails can cut down on essential but less value-added work for employees. It frees them up to do other things. At the same time, it is necessary to orchestrate the transfer of documents between sub-departments and the transformation of data from other parts of government into documents. These may include periodic reports which can be time-consuming.

3. Compliance-There may be internal departmental rules as well as overall government protocols which have to be followed in engagement with citizens as well as within processes. Updating regulations, adhering to these and checking for deviation can require significant time and result in errors. This may be compounded in case of personnel who are under pressure as a result of urgencies. We submit that it possible to encode Compliance into processes by training an AI model on compliance itself. This would embed rules and regulations into workflows by default and enable deviation alerts anytime to be seen easily. The orchestration capability of appropriate platforms would need to ensure that compliance alerts can be set up and compliance updates can be passed into the workflow at any time.
4. Insights-It is possible to gather insights about visitors to a website, a call center or to any other form of engagement user-interface through traditional analytics. However, governments can take advantage of the contextual use of passport and consular services to understand citizen motivations, needs and anticipate their future outlook. This can be done by optimizing data to maximize its efficiency and deliver it in real-time via a temporal vector graph to our platform. The platform can provide multivariate contextual segmentation studies in real-time as well as infer the needs and actions of the same segments. It is also able to infer individual actions in the future based on the snapshot of each engaging citizen and decide how to further interact with him/her. This can not only be used by other parts of the government. It lifts the quality of service to the citizen purely through anticipation based on segmentation and inference. Insights of this nature are continuous and hence these provide a clear picture at any point of time. It helps the passport office to only pay attention to its quality of service but also to anticipate any issues at the individual level. Pre-emptive steps to alert citizens of their need to renew passports or update other documents can be set up and automated as well.
5. Scenario Building-For the Passport office in particular, understanding macro-environment forces and plotting future strategies may be an integral part of decision-making.  While this may be undertaken properly through regular tools, there are several aspects which need a more advanced computing capability. These are Context, Uncertainty and Inferences. It is possible to carry out a multi-scenario simulation for the future as well as a look back at past crises or issues, with a 3D interface. This takes decision discussions beyond what is possible today. Inclusive in this is the ability to detect anomalous signals from within the IT infrastructure of the organization and alert the cybersecurity software.
6. Payment for services through an AI agent- While payment for passport services may be straightforward in-country, it tends to get more complicated when a citizen in a different time zone. Sometimes the available infrastructure may not be conducive to secure online payments. An AI agent will be able to accept payments for the passport office instantly.