Gadget

Every financial institution is looking to digital transformation to meet rising customer expectations for speed and convenience, lower its operating cost, and fend off competition, including from tech companies moving into financial services. Some are spending over 10% of yearly revenue on technology investments, according to Bloomberg. “This is a huge investment and most financial institutions cannot support this for the long term,” says Michael Fei, SME banking CEO at OneConnect Financial Technology, an associate of Ping An Insurance.

The covid-19 pandemic has revealed how even financial institutions that considered themselves digitally advanced are, in reality, still wedded to analog processes along the chain of processing.

“For many financial institutions, this has been a wake-up call,” says Fei. “In the past, many had thought that if they have an online portal and a mobile application then that’s enough. But now they’ve realized it’s not. Some banks have online portals … Read the rest

As the coronavirus vaccines have rolled out across the US, the process has been confusing and disastrous. States, left by the federal government to fend for themselves, have struggled to get a handle on the logistics of distribution. Many, including Georgia, Virginia, and California, have fallen woefully behind schedule.

But even if there were a perfect supply chain, there’s another obstacle: Not all Americans want the vaccine.

Survey data gathered through Facebook by Carnegie Mellon University’s Delphi Lab, one of the nation’s best flu-forecasting teams, showed that more than a quarter of the country’s population would not get vaccinated if it were available to them today. How people feel about receiving vaccinations varies widely by state and county. The percentage of respondents who would accept a vaccine falls as low as 48% in Terrebonne parish, Louisiana, and peaks as high as 92% in Arlington county, Virginia.

The findings … Read the rest

Rumman Chowdhury’s job used to involve a lot of translation. As the “responsible AI” lead at the consulting firm Accenture, she would work with clients struggling to understand their AI models. How did they know if the models were doing what they were supposed to? The confusion often came about partly because the company’s data scientists, lawyers, and executives seemed to be speaking different languages. Her team would act as the go-between so that all parties could get on the same page. It was inefficient, to say the least: auditing a single model could take months.

So in late 2020, Chowdhury left her post to start her own venture. Called Parity AI, it offers clients a set of tools that seek to shrink the process down to a few weeks. It first helps them identify how they want to audit their model—is it for bias or for legal compliance?—and … Read the rest