Leap 2022: Advance AI systems for profitability, banks told

Petr Stransky

Petr Stransky, founder and chief executive of British dispute recovery platform iCEIBA adressed delegated at the Leap 2022 summit. Photo credit:

Photo credit: Faustine Ngila | Nation Media Group

In Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

Banks of the future will have to improve their Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems if they are to adapt to the emerging dynamics of customer preferences in the future.

This, according to fintech experts who spoke during the inaugural Leap 2022 global tech summit in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, could make the difference in profitability in the global banking sector.

“The combination of intelligent propositions and personalized experiences will set an AI bank apart from traditional incumbents,” said Rana Gujral, chief executive officer of Behavioral Signals, an enterprise software company that unravels behavioral signals from speech data.

Noting that banks across the world are struggling to connect with their customers in the current era of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, Mr Gujral stressed the need for personalizing banking experience using AI.

With a major industry shift occurring and the existing practices such as optimising for the first available customer care agent based on routing becoming increasingly ineffective, banks were urged to focus not only on what customers say but also who they say the words and the tonal variations in their speeches.

Human emotions

“Banks need to use AI to understand human emotions, deduce speaking styles, assess human behaviours and predict interval signals generated from the tone of voices.”

By deploying the prowess of Natural Language Processing (NLP), a subset of AI, banks could reach every customer in the language they best understand, even if it is vernacular, further boosting financial inclusion in countries with huge unbanked or underbanked populations.

Devie Mohan

 Chief executive of fintech research company Burnmark, Devie Mohan when she urged insurance companies to advance their technologies in her speech. 


Photo credit: Faustine Ngila | Nation Media Group

Petr Stransky, founder and chief executive of British dispute recovery platform iCEIBA asked financial institutions to do more in leading the way in implementing innovations towards the future of digital finance.

“We are entering an era where everything can be priced and traded in real-time. This will change how we think and act about finance,” he said.

Banks, according to him, will need to use frontier technologies to segregate most functions and gatekeepers for different types of assets and transactions, as customers now jump into Decentralised Finance (DeFi) products such as Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs).

Modern software

To achieve this, banks were asked to use modern software in analysing real-time data on every single detail in their banking operations while observing market trends and the changing customer preferences occasioned by the Covid-19 pandemic.


Chief executive of fintech research company Burnmark, Devie Mohan underscored the need for insurance companies to make data driven predictions to remain in profitable business and rethink their business models.

“Insurers will need to deliver a better digital experience for both panic buyers and long-term customers,” she said.

If banks fail to adapt fast to mobile banking, Ms Mohan warned, bigtech companies could soon take control of the global banking sector, with Google Pay, Apple Pay, Facebook Pay, WhatsApp Pay, Amazon Pay and Alipay all unleashing the power of Big Data analytics to create successful payment across their social networks.

“Big technology companies may become quasi banks,” she said.

The Leap 2022 event has brought together tech leaders from across the world, making it a tech information sharing ecosystem by global players in 5G, fintech, blockchain, Virtual Reality, robotics, cloud management, edtech, medtech, autonomous mobility and 4D printing.