1111. Insights: Make a wish! What would you wish to change about Financial Services?

00:18:29 · Ross Gallagher, Sarah KocianskiPlay from here

To Benjamin's point, the benefits of investing in pensions very early on and how that compounds over the course of a career, etcetera, etcetera. So yeah, I think to your question, you know, how we go about stripping back some of that complexity and again tying it back to customer outcomes as an industry, I think there's probably a way to go. [00:18:50] S4: That makes sense. And and and to follow-up on that with you, Benjamin, perhaps, do you think there is something that needs to change about how financial services communicate information to their customers to help ease this problem, to help ease people's unwillingness or uncertainty around talking about money?

00:19:07 · Benjamin EnsorPlay from here

[00:19:07] S6: Yeah, think the interesting thing here is I think what Kate's sort of driving at is people feel maybe uncomfortable talking about money to their friends and maybe even certain family members because there's this sort of sense of judgment because money is in some ways a metric for success or just as various other things in life are. And that maybe makes people feel uncomfortable. But the issue is being able to find someone else that you can talk to, being able to find a professional, being able to find that doctor. And I think financial advice has often been a bit unavailable for various reasons. And so you end up with this kind of one size fits all type solutions if anything. And so the real issue is how do you provide tailored, relevant sort of financial advice and guidance? And I think if you think about the world twenty years ago before social media, it was much, much harder to find any kind of financial advice guidance. Basically, there were some good money magazines and newspapers. Maybe it's thirty years ago. Right? Yeah. There's an awful lot of actually very, very good guidance available on social media. Unfortunately, there's also a lot of dross and a lot of people who are trying to give you bad advice that's in their interests. But I do think the industry can learn from, you know, some of the amazing content creators who are creating really good accessible content, you know, with visuals and words because some of these concepts, you know, know, Ross, you were just talking about sort of compound returns or leverage, and some of these concepts are a bit complex, particularly if maths wasn't really your thing at school. If you can visualize that for people and talk it through with them and give them someone they can trust to talk it through, think there's a huge opportunity. But it's difficult it is difficult to scale without AI.

00:20:44 · Sarah Kocianski, S7Play from here

[00:20:44] S4: And I suppose there's the two points are linked if historically you were more comfortable talking to your parents or your partner. If you're less comfortable talking to your parents and your partner, what is the option? And especially if your parents don't necessarily understand crypto or leverage, etcetera, either. So I suppose there's both sides of this need to come together to make sure that everybody feels more comfortable talking about money with whoever they feel comfortable doing so with. Right. That's two wishes down. But my duties aren't over yet. After the break, we're turning our attention to AI and what else would change about the financial services industry if we had a magic wand. Don't go anywhere. [00:21:21] S7: Launching innovative payment products is only the beginning. Real progress comes from what happens next. Paymentology fuels continuous compounding momentum as a cloud native issuer processor, helping banks and fintechs grow beyond go live with global reach, local know how, and the power of its Loom platform. Powered by more than 500 paymentologists across 68 countries, they make card programs work naturally across markets. Want to keep the momentum going? Head to paymentology.com.

00:21:21 · S7, Sarah KocianskiPlay from here

[00:21:21] S7: Launching innovative payment products is only the beginning. Real progress comes from what happens next. Paymentology fuels continuous compounding momentum as a cloud native issuer processor, helping banks and fintechs grow beyond go live with global reach, local know how, and the power of its Loom platform. Powered by more than 500 paymentologists across 68 countries, they make card programs work naturally across markets. Want to keep the momentum going? Head to paymentology.com. [00:21:56] S4: Welcome back to Fintech Insider's most magical episode. But, of course, we're celebrating eleven eleven, and I've still got a few wishes left to grant. So let's turn our attention to what could come next. Benjamin, you touched on it at the end of the last segment, but your wish is that AI does customers more good than harm. If I could guarantee that wish came true tomorrow, what would financial services look like?

00:22:17 · Benjamin EnsorPlay from here

[00:22:17] S6: So I always think that artificial intelligence, particularly generative artificial intelligence, is a little bit like nuclear fission. It's an incredibly powerful technology that has immense power to do good, but also immense power to do great harm. We're in the place now where generative artificial intelligence, particularly combined with conversational AI, is going to be able to solve the last big remaining problem in retail financial services, is that many mainstream consumers don't get the financial advice that they need, which is pretty much bang on what Ross and Kate were talking about. So there's this enormous potential for this technology to really, really help millions of people take better decisions, you know, manage their investments more carefully, manage their spending more carefully, avoid bad decisions and so on. And you know, it's not going to fix the cost of living crisis. It's not going transform economies, but it can help individuals and families make better decisions. The tax systems in many countries are horribly complicated, and it's really easy for people to make mistakes that cost them or cost their families because they simply don't understand certain tax traps or certain tax tricks and so on. So there's this huge potential to do good. And yet at the same time, we are seeing bad actors, mostly organized crime, but in the future, it could be foreign state actors and things as well, Taking advantage of AI to trick and fool people out of their money, to propose all sorts of scams on a scale and with a speed that is just mind boggling. You know, I was reading just today about people who themselves have been trying to use AI through a VPN. And there are 8,000,000 people who were using a VPN through a broker, and that broker was intercepting every single thing they were putting into their AI and selling it on. And so there's this enormous potential for harm as organized crime takes advantage of AI to create more and more scams and frauds, you know, with unbelievably convincing video and, you know, starting to hack into our personal information so that there's a lot of social engineering in some of these attacks now, right? Bespoke socially engineered attacks. And so that creates this enormous possibility for harm that actually millions of people around the world will get scammed, will get hacked.

00:24:45 · Benjamin Ensor, Sarah Kocianski, Kate MoodyPlay from here

You know, we're seeing large companies, large banks, you know, getting tricked out of millions of euros because somebody is impersonating somebody else. And we simply don't have the systems and the processes to spot and stop some of that. [00:25:00] S4: I mean, I guess there's kind of we talked there quite a lot about the potential harms, but where is the greatest potential for AI to improve customers' financial lives, individual customers' financial lives? [00:25:12] S6: I think each person is going to be different. I mean, we talked about compound investing. Compound investing is so strong that, you know, persuading people to start investing, start saving in their 20s, if they can, would probably make... Might make the single biggest difference. But there's all sorts of things, you know, where people are missing out on allowances that they might get, where people are making bad decisions around sort of mortgages or credit or borrowing. So without having done a study of it, I can't tell you exactly where the biggest benefit might be, but I suspect it would probably be investing just because in terms of compounding over your lifetime, that's probably the thing that's gonna make the biggest long term decision. Maybe Kate's husband's spending, you know, maybe that could be better reinvested. Who knows? [00:25:55] S2: He's going to be so cross when he finds out that I've spent most of this episode just berating his shopping. Here we go.