ING has partnered with Google and PwC to develop an AI-enabled system capable of crunching huge volumes of financial data in search of hidden signals that indicate heightened levels of credit risk.
The early warning system (EWS) collects and analyses large amounts of data to identify whether clients are exposed to potential risks, a task currently performed manually by risk analysts.
“Speed is of the essence in credit risk management. The earlier we detect any risk, the quicker and better we can serve clients to prevent losses,” says Anand Autar, project leader at ING. “Through machine learning, the EWS scans financial and non-financial information, such as news items from all over the world.”
Processing up to 80,000 articles every day, the EWS is fed real-time market data from Refinitiv and news from public sources. It uses Google’s natural language processing and translation services for articles published in local media outlets.
Görkem Köseoğlu, head of AI and Robotics at ING, says: “The system learns from experience, so in time it will become better at identifying the sentiment of news and developments in the market."
ING aims to add predictive capabilities to the application in the near future.
“This ambition requires further refinement of algorithms, and we’ll get there,” said Görkem. “Customers expect more predictive capabilities in their products and services, so for us meeting that customer demand is important.”