Matt Wilcox Pro

I worked for a man who stopped by a drive-up coffee hut each morning on his way to the office. Upon seeing his car pull into the lot, the barista set about preparing his coffee so it was ready when he reached the window. The barista greeted him by name. Every eleventh cup was free, but knowing my boss didn’t like punch cards, the barista kept track for him.

More than once my boss wondered aloud how to get our organization to consistently deliver a like level of personal service across the board. The answer was, we couldn’t. The coffee hut was a one-off business, the barista was the owner, and she cared about customers the way only owners do.

It is the bane of every growing business—how do we get hundreds of employees in hundreds of locations to care the way the boss cares? The traditional approach has always been to invest in training programs and hope they work. (“Why not just hire polite people?” a training video scriptwriter of my acquaintance asked. The HR director replied, “When you need to keep over a thousand teller positions filled, you take warm and breathing and hope you can teach them manners.”) 

But zeros and ones may be poised to deliver a reasonable imitation of genuine customer care. I refer to MasterCard’s recently announced Innovation Engine. It …

… serves as a hub for the enablement of varying digital solutions, the first of which provides highly personalized and contextually relevant cardholder experiences.

In plainer English, Mastercard’s new software can quite literally know when your car is on approach, remember how you take your coffee, and keep track of your rewards points for you. Indeed, a photo in Mastercard’s press release shows a customer, fresh coffee in hand, viewing a text that reads, “Looks like this is your favorite spot. Want to make your coffee free every morning using your points?” 

Mastercard created the Innovation Engine in collaboration with Flybits and Kasisto. At its heart of is “… contextually-relevant and personalized digital engagement and servicing.” According to Mastercard,

The data contextualization capabilities of Flybits, and the conversational capabilities of Kasisto enable personalized offerings and experiences to be delivered to the right customer at the right time, providing value to today’s digitally-savvy consumer while also helping issuers and merchants reduce costs.

A Flybits press release quotes Kasisto CEO Zor Gorelov:

Kasisto’s differentiated digital conversation platform helps banks and merchants personalize how consumers explore and understand the rewards and benefits tied to their card.

The Innovation Engine promises to let consumers use any payment card on any device, make near-instant P2P and other disbursements, access trend and sales data faster than government and other services, measure digital media campaign effectiveness, and rate transactions as to likelihood of fraud.

The concept of machine-enhanced labor has been around since 1875 England, when mechanized looms took over work until then performed by artisan weavers. This led directly to the rise of the Luddites—rhymes with “Bud Lights”—a secret society whose mission was to destroy machinery. Today, Luddite is used to refer to anyone opposed to technological advance of any sort.

But great customer service has always depended on the ability to put Oneself in The Other’s shoes. In short, empathy. It takes empathy to understand a customer’s point of view, infer needs, sense moods, and discern the intent behind a question in order to respond appropriately. Empathy is a hallmark of social creatures like humans, canines, cetaceans—even vampire bats!—but to date it eludes even the most powerful AIs. 

But given sufficient data, it’s possible to correlate most-common behaviors with most-common needs and preferences, and to correlate most-common needs and preferences with most-common desired responses. 

Like, for instance, having your coffee ready for you when you show up at the window and keeping track of your points. 

Which, from the customer’s view, can look a lot like empathy.

Who knows? Technology may yet meet my former boss’s challenge. It might not be a stretch to suggest that Mastercard’s Innovation Engine aspires to simulate caring as if it owns the place.

But I cannot resist taking it a step further. The day is probably not far off when consumers will dispatch AIs of their own to do business on their behalf. I wonder if consumer AIs will be able to tell they’re dealing with merchant AIs. 

It could be a whole new level of Turing Test.

Crowing about the need to bring jobs back from across the ocean makes for powerful rhetoric, but technological advances account for the lion’s share of lost jobs in the U.S. Financial Times pointed out:

The US did indeed lose about 5.6m manufacturing jobs between 2000 and 2010. But according to a study by the Center for Business and Economic Research at Ball State University, 85 percent of these jobs losses are actually attributable to technological change—largely automation—rather than international trade.

Technology now appears poised to take its toll on banking jobs. How much of a toll depends on whom you believe. Estimates vary from zero to one-half of jobs.

More and more, the culprit of choice seems to be Artificial Intelligence, or AI for short. According to Forbes:

Over the past decade, the digitalization of customer services has led to a decline in the need for front-of-house staff in banks and the subsequent closure of many branches. Similarly, one of the primary areas where banks are implementing new AI solutions is customer services.

As I wrote earlier this year, AI has its artificial fingers in many a financial services industry pie. Examples include day-to-day transactions, online queries, better-informed investment services, fraud detection and prevention, and more. These are not new tasks; they are tasks heretofore performed by humans. 

Hence the UK’s Independent reported former Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit’s prediction that “developments in technology could cut the number of banking jobs by 30 percent in the next five years.” That was about 20 months ago. If he was right, we should know in about three years.

Consulting firm Opimas seems to agree with Pandit. Last week, Finextra reported:

Opimas believes the asset management industry—already under tremendous pressure due to declining management fees and slowing asset inflows—will see some of the greatest cutbacks in the workforce, shedding about one third of its headcount.

The Bay Area’s Mercury News appears even less optimistic:

Advances in artificial intelligence and automation could replace as many as half the nation’s financial services workers over the next decade, industry experts say, but it’s going to take a big investment to make that happen. James D’Arezzo, CEO of Glendale-based Condusiv Technologies, says that’s where things are headed.

More sanguine is Paula O’Reilly, international consulting firm Accenturemanaging director. Responding earlier this year in American Banker to the notion that AI will lead to “massive job loss,” O’Reilly minced no words, stating, “That mindset is wrong.” Moreover,

Banks looking to successfully deploy AI will need to rely on a vibrant workforce that is retrained and refocused to work in tandem with AI … AI will take back the rote functionality that occupies too much of bankers’ time, unleashing them to use their inherent creative and dynamic abilities.

Allowing that “…The World Economic Forum projects that 5 million jobs will be lost in the top 15 developed economies within the next 24 months,” O’Reilly counters,

More accurately, AI will displace jobs in some areas while creating an equal amount of new jobs elsewhere. The losses will be largely among the transactional workforce, while the direct gains will be in skilled AI-related positions.

It’s true enough that whenever technology obviates hands-on jobs, it creates new jobs in or relating to AI. But there’s no basis for predicting the creation of an equal number of jobs. Regardless of how many workers successfully transition into other positions, AI’s taking over certain jobs, no matter how tedious, will necessarily create redundancies. When that happens, economy demands downsizing.

O’Reilly addresses that concern, writing that Accenture’s “… recent discussions with more than 1,200 banking leaders indicate that more than 90 percent expect these shifts and plan to retrain and redeploy their workforce as needed.” That figure may speak more to the PR skills of 90 percent of CEOs than to reality. Last month, according to Business Insider, Accenture offered less encouraging news:

… while 54 percent of executives in banking say the skills gap will influence workplace strategy, only 3 percent say they plan to increase investment in reskilling over the next three years, according to consulting firm Accenture.

It would be naïve to think that everyone who loses a job to AI will simply step into an AI-related job. Some workers are more retrainable, and some less, than others. Ageism may rear its ugly head in the case of older workers. And while it’s pleasing to talk about freeing workers to perform tasks requiring a human touch, it’s important to remember that not all humans are created equal when it comes to skills. Sometimes there’s a reason certain employees are kept working as far from customers as possible. 

In an article for Forbes, Quantexa CEO Vishal Marria seems to land somewhere in the middle:

… one of the primary areas where banks are implementing new AI solutions is customer services … J.P. Morgan uses AI to answer customers’ questions and anticipate what their future needs are likely to be, while UBS’s virtual assistant is powered by Amazon Alexa. These products are the ones that are most likely to replace jobs. 

Aside from chatbots and Robotic Process Automation … the way that banks are currently using AI is not a considerable threat to their employees’ jobs … In these instances, rather than reducing the need for human input, the AI-powered systems have alleviated time pressures on existing investigators and afforded them the time to investigate each case in more detail.

Throughout history, technology has wreaked havoc in terms of job loss in industry after industry. Smartphones alone have cut deeply into a host of products such as video and digital cameras, scientific calculators, bicycle speedometers, encyclopedias, and CD players, to name a few. Significant job loss has been associated with each. I am not unsympathetic. I wish I had a solution.

By the time you see this post, New Yorkers will be covering fares on selected subway routes by means of the city’s new, contactless payment system. 

In accordance with governments’ propensity to come up with acronyms, the city has named the service OMNY, for One Metro New York.

Whether New Yorkers embrace OMNY remains to be seen. My figurative money says they will. Meanwhile, the city’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), Visa, and Chase have put literal money on it.

You may wonder why I consider MTA’s jumping aboard the contactless payment bandwagon newsworthy. After all, with contactless payment having attained some ubiquity by now, opt-ins by various verticals and major chains have long ceased making headlines. Another merchant accepts contactless payments? Yawn. Tell me something I don’t know.

Why it’s news

MTA’s going contactless is news largely because the expression “in a New York minute” has some basis in fact. 

A minute comprises 60 seconds in most places. But a New York minute, as the late comedian Johnny Carson put it, is “the interval between a Manhattan traffic light turning green and the guy behind you honking his horn.” 

Nowhere is time a more precious commodity than when you’re trying to board a New York subway. If you don’t believe me, I invite you try this experiment: Stand at a turnstile and fumble with your wallet for a few seconds. Chances are a chorus of protest will swell behind you in … well, in a New York minute. As PYMNTS.com editorialized, the New York City mass transit system is …

… an unforgiving environment where people are famously told not to look too long at other riders, so you can imagine the frustrations in store if those payments should fail while someone is trying to catch a subway to work … according to Visa statistics, 67 percent of riders have missed a train while waiting in line to reload a fare card. In addition, 83 percent of consumers said they’ve had trouble getting their fare cards to work at turnstiles, and 66 percent have left funds on transit cards (the definition of leaving money on the table).

Which means that OMNY had better work, and work right, the first time, or mayhem may ensue. To minimize the mayhem risk, plans are not to roll out OMNY across all subway stations and bus routes until October of next year. For the time being, MTA is slated for a small-scale test run beginning on May 31. 

MTA’s chief revenue official Al Putre, reports AM New York, is all too aware of what happened in 2013 when the Chicago Transit Authority—the transportation organization, not the band—launched contactless payments system-wide without first testing small: 

Chicago essentially flipped a switch, transitioning to a similar tap card payment model, which led to mass confusion, a host of bugs and other payment failures. The snafu resulted in the Chicago Transit Authority granting almost a million free bus and train rides in the first weeks of the launch, according to the Chicago Tribune. “I don’t want eight million people tapping right off the bat,” said Putre … “They did this in Chicago. They almost fired the mayor!”

OMNY is driven (so to speak) by software developed by San Diego firm Cubic Transportation Systems. Cubic also designed Chicago’s system. Unlike Chicago’s system, however, MTA will be the first U.S. transit agency to use Visa’s Global Transit model. This Visa describes as …

… a back-office framework to manage contactless payments regardless of transit operators’ size or fare structure. The Visa model enables operators to offer a range of flexible fares, including fixed fares, distance- and time-based fares, and multi-modal fares, as well as features like fare capping, concessions, and delay refunds.

Riders can use OMNY in a variety of ways. Downloadable apps will allow riders to tap smartphones and wearables to cover fares. Or, riders can tap a Chase-issued Visa contactless card. Chase was a major player OMNY’s development. According to Bloomberg, there is no shortage of Chase contactless cardholders:

Today, about 20 million Chase customers have Visa contactless credit cards …That will also include debit cards for Chase Secure Banking customers, a low-cost bank account that opens Chase accounts to even more New Yorkers and public transit riders.

OMNY is set to launch on May 31, so, again, by the time you see this post, we’ll have some indication as to how well New Yorkers accept it. You could call May 31 a “soft opening.” Besides limiting access to a few test locations, MTA has wisely placed “TEST PHASE” on OMNY terminal screens. The hope is to iron out wrinkles on a small scale for a wrinkle-free rollout in October 2020. As Putre said, “You only get one chance to get this right.”

On May 9, the U.S. House Committee on Financial Services issued a press release announcing the formation of two task forces: one on financial technology, to be chaired by Congressman Stephen Lynch (D-MA), and the other on artificial intelligence, to be chaired by Congressman Bill Foster (D-IL).

Committee chair Maxine Waters (D-CA) said: 

As new technologies emerge and the financial services industry puts those technologies to use, Congress must make sure that responsible innovation is encouraged, and that regulators and the law are adapting to the changing landscape to best protect consumers, investors and small businesses. The new task forces … will help Congress to stay on top of new developments in these areas so that we are well-positioned to make policy.

Finextra reports that the fintech task force …

… will look at domestic and international regulation … as well as the infrastructure and legal and regulatory framework for efficient payments. Other areas of interest … include fintech and lending, specifically the use of alternative data for loan underwriting, and the use of big data and its implications for privacy.

… while the AI task force will look into AI’s …

…applications in financial services and regulation, its use in digital identification and combating fraud, and how automation could impact jobs in financial services and the overall economy.

Agree or not on the need, government oversight is an inevitability. And if that’s a given, I’d prefer Congress stay “on top of new developments” rather than make rules from an uninformed perspective. My concern, of course, is that government isn’t terribly good at nuance. It has a long history of resorting to bludgeons in matters better suited to surgical lasers. Yet on the crypocurrency and blockchain front, Cointelegraph sounds a hopeful note:

Some noted crypto-friendly representatives such as Warren Davidson (R) and Tom Emmer (R) will be joining the newly-founded fintech task force … Davidson reintroduced the Token Taxonomy Act with fellow representative Darren Soto (D), with the intent of providing regulatory certainty and discluding cryptocurrencies from securities laws. Emmer proposed three pro-blockchain and crypto bills in 2018: the Resolution Supporting Digital Currencies and Blockchain Technology, the Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act, and the Safe Harbor for Taxpayers with Forked Assets Act.

The action is timely. 

AI is playing an increasingly large role in fintech. Last week, a number of news outlets carried a press release from tech company Globality, Inc. announcing that “HSBC, one of the world’s leading banking and financial services companies … is adopting Globality’s innovative AI-based Platform for sourcing and procurement of services.” As reported by Yahoo:

Finding the best service provider at the right price for every project is impossible to achieve with legacy systems that are mostly analog and are not continuously learning, capturing knowledge, or digitally sharing results and feedback. As a result, companies do not get maximum value from third-party suppliers.

However …

… with Globality’s AI-based Platform, HSBC users will be able to scope projects in hours rather than days, and intelligently match their unique requirements to the best suppliers around the world.

Et tu, Watson?

Watson has of late poked its (his?) nose under the financial services tent as well. Named for the company’s first CEO, Thomas J. Watson—the same who infamously said, “I think there is a world market for maybe five computers”—IBM’s signature AI has come a long way since besting Ken Jennings and Brad Ruttler on the TV quiz show “Jeopardy.” To wit, these days Watson is helping Regions Bank call center employees render faster, more relevant, better informed service. A press release from IBM explains that with Watson Assistant, Regions Bank employees … 

… can use AI-powered search when faced with a question to provide quicker call resolutions and more consistent answers. Already, 700 professionals at the bank rely on Watson to complete customer problem resolution. 

And Regions customers who call for more routine needs often have the honor of addressing Watson itself (himself?):

… many interact directly with Watson Assistant receiving rapid and consistent answers to their questions. They can get help on a variety of issues including updating personal information and navigating the Regions Bank website. Letting Watson take on the more routine questions allows service representatives to tackle the more intellectually challenging questions, spend more time engaging with customers and be better informed to resolve issues. 

In time, Watson will be expected to take on more tasks at Regions, “… including analyzing customers’ tone to help determine when a customer should be transferred to a live agent.” 

It’s probably wise to continually increase Watson’s responsibilities. We wouldn’t want something that “smart” to grow bored.

The use of AIs in financial services is growing at a fast pace. If Congress has trouble keeping up, it may sooner or later need help from its own AI.

In 1978’s Superman the Movie, Superman rescues Lois Lane in mid-fall from a helicopter. Safely depositing her on her feet, he says, “Well, I certainly hope this little incident hasn’t put you off flying, miss. Statistically speaking, of course, it’s still the safest way to travel.”

In the wake of the recent theft of over 7,000 bitcoin—about $40 million worth—from Taiwan-based cryptocurrency exchange Binance, I am inclined to say something similar: Don’t let this incident put you off Blockchain.

The recent heist was by no means the largest. According to The Washington Post, that honor goes to an incident in 2014 …

… when Japan-based Mt. Gox said that attackers stole nearly $500 million worth of the digital currency. And in 2016, hackers nabbed about $72 million in bitcoin from Hong Kong-based Bitfinex.

Yet financial institutions and fintechs are embracing, not fleeing, blockchain technology. JPMorgan Chase is expanding its blockchain project. There are some 40 central banks looking into blockchain as I write. And Medium lists 143 banks and other 87 other types of financial organizations using blockchain.

When it comes to security, it’s important to remember that bitcoin and blockchain are not the same thing. As R. R. Hauxley pointed out writing for Crytomania:

Bitcoin is built on top of blockchain technology, and so are other cryptocurrencies. Blockchain technology is used way beyond cryptocurrencies. It has a seemingly endless number of applications in various industries.

As for the recent heist, Binance said in a press release last week:

We have discovered a large scale security breach today, May 7, 2019 at 17:15:24 (UTC). Hackers were able to obtain a large number of user API keys, 2FA codes, and potentially other info. The hackers used a variety of techniques, including phishing, viruses and other attacks. We are still concluding all possible methods used. There may also be additional affected accounts that have not been identified yet. 

Phishing. Viruses. Other attacks. Perhaps Binance is hinting that what the hackers hacked wasn’t so much Binance as Binance users. For all its merits, blockchain isn’t impervious to human foible. 

With all but an admiring tone, Binance continued:

The hackers had the patience to wait, and execute well-orchestrated actions through multiple seemingly independent accounts at the most opportune time. The transaction is structured in a way that passed our existing security checks.

Firms like Binance store a small percentage of cryptocurrency in what’s known as a “hot” wallet, that is, the data are online, as opposed to the balance stored offline in what’s called—and I bet you saw this coming—a “cold” wallet. That makes the cold wallet an inaccessible target for hackers, and the hot wallet an irresistible one. 

The hackers found their way into Binance’s hot wallet and obtained the data with a single transaction. But, not to worry, according to Binance: “The above transaction is the only affected transaction. It impacted our BTC hot wallet only (which contained about 2% of our total BTC holdings). All of our other wallets are secure and unharmed.” Moreover, all losses are covered by insurance.

The moment Binance became aware of the problem, which was almost immediately, the company halted all deposits and withdrawals for about a week because “the hackers may still control certain user accounts and may use those to influence prices in the meantime.” On May 15, Bitcoin announced it had completed its system upgrade and would “resume all trading activity” later that day.

Not surprisingly, the value of bitcoin took a hit in the wake of the hack, but seems to have for the most part recovered. The same The Washington Post article points out that bitcoin’s value has been declining since hitting its $20,000 peak a little over a year ago:

Even cryptocurrency investors unscathed by hacks and scammers are still feeling the pain of a market that has dwindled in value. At its peak, in December 2017, bitcoin was worth nearly $20,000, igniting a buying frenzy … By February 2018, bitcoin’s value was cut in half. Then in December, a year after its peak, bitcoin had fallen below $4,000, a drop of more than 80 percent. The rest of the cryptocurrency market soon followed bitcoin’s lead … As of [May 8, 2019], bitcoin was trading at $5,901.

But the value of blockchain as a technology is strong as ever. As Marc West and I wrote for Fiserv’s The Point,

There are many types of blockchains. Most either are permissioned (private) or permission-less (public). As the names imply, a permissioned design requires pre-established and approval-based access to create, manage, transfer or seal any digital assets. Permission-less blockchains allow for self-registry and identity-less access. For financial services, the most secure and practical type is a private blockchain. Only known participants and digital assets are permitted to use that type of network design … blockchain enhances security by ensuring all parties are known, all transactions are cryptographically verifiable and no private data ever leaves the institution.

So I hope this little $40 million incident hasn’t put you off blockchain. Statistically speaking, of course, it’s still a safe way to transact.