WHITEPAPER

The New Wave of

Artificial Intelligence
CONTENT

1. INTRODUCTION 2. WHY A.I. IS 3. WHAT IS 4. THE EMERGING 5. A.I. IN BANKING

DIFFERENT THIS TIME INTELLIGENCE A.I. ECONOMY
 What is Artificial  Wealth
Intelligence?  The decreasing  Emergence  The Machine Management for
cost of computing Intelligence the masses
 The only thing you  What Emergence
need to know power business landscape  Customer support/
means for A.I.
about A.I.  The availability of  A glimpse at some help desk
data innovative  Advanced
companies Analytics
 Better algorithms
 Summary  Fraud Detection
 Conclusion
 Underwriting

 Steps forward

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 Foreword
In this research paper we will explore the current
wave of A.I. technologies and A.I. businesses. We
will start off with our main hypothesis of why A.I. is
different this time. This is followed by a quick
survey of the emerging A.I. economy where we
will look at examples of companies leveraging this
new technology to disrupt existing industries and
create new ones. This will hopefully give the
reader some feeling of what kind of applications
A.I. is used for today.

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1. INTRODUCTION

1 INTRODUCTION
We are living in the midst of a surge of interest and
research into Artificial Intelligence (hereby A.I.). It can
seem like every week there is a new breakthrough in the
field and a new record set in some task previously done
by humans. Not too long ago, A.I. seemed a distant
dream for especially interested researchers. Today it is all
around us. We carry it in our pockets, it's in our cars and
No easy definition of what is AI
in many of the web services we use throughout the day.
and what is just normal IT.
As this technology matures, every business must ask itself
the central question: how will this disrupt my industry? between the two concepts. For the purpose of this
Throughout this research paper, we will investigate the paper, it is best to avoid the technical definitions used
possible implications of the rise of A.I. on the banking by academics in the field, and instead think of AI
industry. technology as the sort of technology you would use to
do tasks that require some level of intelligence to
What is Artificial Intelligence? accomplish. With the added feature that AI systems
If we ask Wikipedia; Artificial Intelligence (AI) is "the often are the kind of systems deployed in domains
intelligence exhibited by machines or software. It is also where there is a lot of uncertainty. The simplest example
the name of the academic field of study which studies of this is a chess computer vs. a calculator. Both chess
how to create computers and computer software that and arithmetic requires some level of intelligence, but
are capable of intelligent behavior". While this seems like whereas in chess there is a lot of uncertainty with regards
a reasonable definition, a lot of people struggle with to the opponents next move, the routine calculations
identifying the difference between AI and ordinary performed by a calculator contains no uncertainty.
software. This is a fair point, as there is no clear line

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The only thing you need to know about A.I.
This is not the first period of massive public interest in A.I.
In fact, A.I.'s long history of being “The Next Big Thing”
has led the current top researchers in the field to publicly
downplay their findings, in order to avoid the hype
getting out of hand. Ever since the start of the field, the
long term goal of A.I. research has been what is called
A.I has followed a classic boom
Strong A.I., a computerized brain capable of doing
and bust cycle ever since.
every intelligence task that a human can perform.
Roughly every decade since the 1950's, promises have been made about the impending arrival of Strong A.I.,
and every time these promises were broken, all the
funding for A.I. research dried up in what the industry
calls “A.I. Winters”.

This brings us to one of the main points of this research

paper. We are now at a point where the disruptive force
of A.I. technology no longer hinges on whether or not
Strong A.I. is ever achieved. The only thing you as a
business person need to know about A.I. is this: the
technology has now matured to a level where it,
regardless of future progress in the field, is set to disrupt
almost any technology based industry. The reasons for
Figure 1: A chess board. this will be explained in the following sections.

Source: http://pixshark.com/chess.htm PAGE 5 LABS

2. WHY A.I. IS DIFFERENT THIS TIME

2 WHY A.I. IS DIFFERENT THIS TIME

It is a saying in finance that the most expensive four
words in the English language is “This time it's different”.
The saying is meant to imprint caution in the mind of
people looking to invest in hyped assets with a history of
disappointment. Given the history of A.I., one might do
well to keep this in mind. However, is it possible to find
any justification for why it is, in fact, different this time?
Google, Facebook, Baidu etc.
Kevin Kelly, the founding executive editor of Wired, lists
are hiring all the A.I. experts they
the following three reasons.
can get their hands on

The decreasing cost of computing power calculations that used to take up to several weeks, now
Thinking, for all practical purposes, is computation. And take less then a day, and the time is shrinking. Building
in order to simulate a system that is even remotely intelligent applications would simply not be possible
intelligent, a great number of computations are needed. without the increase in cheap, available computing
Moore's law, which says that the number of transistors on power that we have been fortunate to witness the last
integrated circuits double roughly every two years, has decades.
provided growing computational capacity for the last
five decades. But this is not enough. Luckily, it was
discovered during the last decade that GPUs, the chips
used for generating computer graphics in video games
etc., were eminently suited to run the sort of massive
parallel computations needed for building A.I.
architecture. In practical terms, this has meant that

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The availability of data
It is no coincidence that the recent intense interest in A.I.
from the tech industry comes right after Big Data
became a household word. The by far biggest investors
in A.I. technology are Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Baidu
and Microsoft. They have hired almost all the leading
researchers in the field and setup their own research labs
Several breakthroughs in
algorithms for machine learning
during the last decade.

which is what these companies are looking for. There is

an interesting symbiosis between A.I. research and data:
Just like the brain of a child, an A.I. system needs huge
amounts of information in order to learn. And companies
who sit on huge amounts of information usually wants to
minimize the human effort of analyzing this data. This
relationship is bound to fuel the development of A.I.
going forward. A nice example of this is IBM's Watson
internally. The common denominator for these engine. Watson is a distributed cognitive system,
companies is that they sit on truly massive amounts of meaning that it is spread out in the cloud, collecting
data that they need to analyze. A.I. bears the promise of information every time it's being used, everywhere. This
an automatic analysis and management of this data, means that the more people use Watson, the better the
system becomes at it's job.

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2. WHY A.I. IS DIFFERENT THIS TIME

Better algorithms
A new type of algorithms lies at the heart of this new A.I.
wave and it's safe to say that without these, the data
and computing power would amount to nothing. It
might come as a surprise that it is all based on
technology from the 50's, called Artificial Neural
Networks (ANN), which is an attempt to model the
Moore’s law has not yet failed,
network of nerve cells in a human brain on a computer.
and innovations have been
Loosely speaking, it is a interconnected web of artificial
made in utilizing graphics
neurons that either fire or not based on what the input to
processors.
the neuron is. A key part of building these neural
networks, is to be able to train them to do the correct
thing when they see data. Even though this technology
is as old as the field of A.I. itself, it was not until recently
(2007) that we had the algorithms to train truly big
networks that could solve more interesting problems. The
study of these algorithms has now spawned its own sub-
field of A.I. known as Deep Learning, its name
referencing the number of neuron layers in the neural
networks.

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 Conclusion
The combination of the three factors outlined above
have laid the ground for a wealth of consumer and
business facing applications, most of which we have not
yet seen. There exists a big gap between where
businesses could be and where they are in terms of
building internal competency with, and implementing,
this technology. It is precisely because of this gap that
we maintain the hypothesis that the disruptive force of
A.I. is almost completely independent of the future
progression of the field. It has already arrived.

Figure 2: Moore's law.

Source: The Economist PAGE 9 LABS

3. WHAT IS INTELLIGENCE

3 WHAT IS INTELLIGENCE
The field of A.I. can seem quite daunting for non-
specialists and part of the reason for this is because the
way we think about intelligence has changed during the
last couple of decades. This has had the result that it can
be very hard for non-experts to understand what this
technology can be used for. As will be explained in this
section, it's all about changing how one thinks about
General A.I. would have a
intelligence.
human or superhuman level of
intelligence
In the beginning of the field of A.I.'s existence, one
thought that the way to approach it was to instill a
computer with logical 'rules' that would result in rational
behavior, and then populate this computer with facts
about the world in a big “Knowledge Table”. This
approach was later shown to be doomed to fail.
Manually typing in facts about the world, and hoping
that strict rules would help the computer understand the
relations between these facts, becomes exponentially
cumbersome as you add more facts.

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 intelligent behavior is in reality a finely tuned network of
very simple parts. This view of intelligence as the
behavior of simple parts in a complex system has some
interesting consequences, because it has led to scientists
finding what fits this definition of intelligence in surprising
places. For example, a single termite is not especially
smart. One might even go so far as to call it stupid. But a
A specialist A.I. can drive a car or
termite colony exhibits intelligent behavior in the sense
play chess, not very good outside
that it builds complex structures to live in, which even
it’s domain.
has built-in fungus farms for food supply. This type of
Emergence behavior can be seen many places in the insect world:
The fact is that we do not really understand what the aggregate behavior of “simple” insects is surprisingly
intelligence is or where it comes from. This goes for not complex and adaptive to changes in the colony's
only the artificial kind, but also our innate intelligence. environment. The effectiveness of the bugs' methods has
One reason for this problem is the many different not been lost on the people in computer science. There
definitions of intelligence. However, there have been is now an entire class of algorithms known as Swarm
some developments 'lately'. Science has throughout the Intelligence algorithms that attempt to solve problems in
last decades increasingly adopted the view of this decentralized, self-organizing way.
intelligence as an emergent property of some complex
systems. That means that the aggregate behavior of
very simple parts of certain complex systems lead to
intelligent behavior. The part of you or the people you
know that is responsible for what can be called

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3. WHAT IS INTELLIGENCE

Each node in a network like the one in Figure 3 is simply

a function that either outputs a 1 or a 0 based on its
input from other neurons. But with enough of these
neurons stacked in layers one after another, and with
enough training data, a network somewhat like this can
be taught to recognize faces and other objects in
pictures. One of the more impressive examples of this is a
system by Google (Figure 4) that can automatically
Figure 3: Example architecture of a caption images. It does this by using one neural network
Artificial Neural Network to attempt to recognize all the important objects in the

What Emergence means for A.I. picture, then it uses a second neural network to
generate sentences about the relationship between
This whole new wave of artificial intelligence research these objects. What these examples show is that the
and technology really hinges on this “emergence-view” correct set of algorithms, with the correct training can
of intelligence being a useful way to analyze intelligent learn to distinguish signal from noise in a way that is
systems. The reason for this is that if intelligence is not an meaningful to humans. The fact that the input data in
emergent phenomenon, then humans will have to build
these examples are pictures is irrelevant. This begs the
intelligent systems from scratch. That is simply not question of what we will be able to build with systems
feasible. So this is why most modern A.I. systems are built
whose sensory input consists entirely of say bank
with the purpose of self-learning through emergent customer data, transaction data including fraud cases,
complex behavior of simple parts. The most common stock prices and so on. These are the questions that
example of this is Artificial Neural Networks (see Figure 3 some of the companies in the next section attempt to
on next page for an illustration). answer.

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 Figure 4: The automatic captioning system recognizes
objects in photographs and then tries to choose a
sentence that explains the scene.

Source: http://googleresearch.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/a-picture-is-worth-thousand-coherent.html PAGE 13 LABS

4. THE EMERGING A.I. ECONOMY

4 THE EMERGING A.I. ECONOMY

Talk of artificial intelligence often creates images of
HAL9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey or Skynet from the
Terminator movies. This is only natural, as Hollywood for a
long time has been one of the main providers of futuristic
visions to the public. However, to get a more realistic
picture of how this technology will affect the world
around us, it probably makes more sense to study the
“Whoever wins AI, wins the
business models of the companies trying to build this
internet” – Andrew Ng, Chief
future right now. In the following sections, we will have a
Data Scientist at Baidu.
look at the technology landscape of the Machine
Intelligence industry, and look at companies that are named Shivon Zilis spent three months building just such
using A.I. to deliver services in a way that might surprise a technology landscape for what she calls the machine
you. intelligence sector (Shown in a too small picture in Figure
5). She built a list of over 2 500 A.I. or machine learning
The Machine Intelligence business related companies and start-ups and narrowed it down
landscape to what you see in Figure 5. The landscape is sliced
A good way to get a feel for an up-and-coming nicely into the following segments, which we will go
technology industry is to build what is called a through in turn: Core Technologies, Rethinking Enterprise,
technology landscape. A technology landscape is Rethinking Industries, Rethinking Humans/HCI and
nothing more than a big picture with a lot of company Supporting Technologies.
logos on it, where the companies are segmented by the
problem they are trying to address or value they want to
offer. In 2014, a Venture Capitalist at Bloomberg Beta

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 CORE TECHNOLOGIES

RETHINKING ENTERPRISE

RETHINKING INDUSTRIES

RETHINKING HUMANS / HCI SUPPORTING TECHNOLOGIES

Figure 5: The Machine Intelligence Landscape, by Shivon Zilis.

Source: www.shivonzilis.com/machineintelligence
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4. THE EMERGING A.I. ECONOMY

CORE TECHNOLOGIES Knewton, which aims to deliver personalized education

The companies in the Core Technologies segment are to every student, Lex Machina, which offers an analytics
the ones working directly with advancing the A.I. and engine that lawyers can use to search for similar cases,
Machine Learning fields. They range from technology relevant laws etc., and many others.
providers to other A.I. driven companies, to companies
providing advanced analytics products directly to the RETHINKING HUMANS/ HCI
end user. This is the wild card category containing the more sci-fi
like companies. Here you will find companies attempting
RETHINKING ENTERPRISES to make computers understand human emotions and
This segment contains the companies attempting to designers of various augmented reality products.
leverage machine intelligence in order to build smarter
enterprise solutions for companies in general. Examples SUPPORTING TECHNOLOGIES
of this range from advanced churn prediction software, The companies in this segment offer products or services
that can alert sale teams that a customer is growing that enable the companies in the other segments to do
dissatisfied (Preakt), to smart fraud detection, that their thing. This ranges from chip makers, to providers of
analyzes fraud in real-time using over 5 000 signals (Sift user friendly software for web-scraping and other
Science). information gathering. Among the more exciting and
ambitious projects in this segment, we have HP and IBM's
RETHINKING INDUSTRIES attempts to rethink the way we do computing by
The Rethinking Industries segment is composed of designing what is called neuromorphic (brainlike)
companies using A.I. to change the way things are done hardware.
in existing industries. It is here you will find many of the
more “sexy” A.I. start-ups. Among them, we have

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A glimpse at some innovative companies
In order to get a better feeling for how A.I. is driving new
types of businesses, we will take a more thorough look at
some of the companies from the landscape.

These three companies are

Deepmind, Numenta, Vicarious
chasing “Strong AI”. No focus on
For the purpose of this research paper, these companies
short term rewards or commercial
are so similar that we might as well bundle them
application. Biggest disruptive
together. All three companies are trying to solve the
potential.
Strong A.I. problem, and all three are backed by titans
of the Tech industry: Deepmind is backed by Google, internet”. These companies mark an interesting shift in
Vicarious by Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, and the development of core A.I. technology. The
Numenta by Palm Computing founder Jeff Hawkins. technology used to drive the current generation of A.I.
While all three companies have examples of applications was usually conceived at academic
applications for their products, they more resemble institutions and then later adopted by corporates. Now,
private sector research labs than conventional we have a situation where the tech giants have placed
companies. a large number of the industry's experts in their internal
laboratories, which might lead to less openness about
But these companies are not interesting because of their technical breakthroughs going forward.
products' immediate applications, but because they
represent the front line in an ever-intensifying arms race
in Silicon Valley. As put by Andrew Ng of Stanford and
Chinese search giant Baidu, “Whoever wins A.I., wins the

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4. THE EMERGING A.I. ECONOMY

VIV - The Global Brain

VIV is the brainchild of the original team behind Apple's
A.I. assistant Siri. Siri is one of the first examples of an A.I.
helper that the the public actually has appreciated
(remember Microsoft's Office Assistant paperclip?). She
could search the web for you, send texts, set alarms and
even had a sense of humor. The creators however, felt
that the project had stopped short of what was possible. The Grid is an example of a
So right after the death of Steve Jobs, they left Apple to specialized “servant AI”.
set up VIV Labs, where they are now hatching their next Designed to do work humans find
creation. Their ambition for VIV is to create a truly boring.
generalist A.I. assistant for all platforms. They have intelligence instead of using e.g. web browsers when
designed it around three principles: It will be taught by carrying out tasks like buying airplane tickets. As the
the world, it will know more than it is taught and it will technology becomes less visible and more human-like in
learn something new every day. That means that if it its capabilities, it becomes easier to use for everyone.
helps you solving a problem after some trial and error,
then that solution becomes available for every other The Grid
user that encounters the same problem afterwards. The founder of The Grid, Dan Tocchini, used to work as a
Having VIV help you find a suitable wine for lasagna on website designer. After a couple of years in the industry,
your way to your friend's house is one of their more he began to find the tasks menial and repetitive. Every
impressive examples. VIV is a good example of the time a business is changing something about itself,
companies that believe that a lot of people will in the offering a new product, entering new markets etc. that
near future interface with some form of machine change needs to be reflected in the website. This usually

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means that a person needs to do the painstaking work The Grid represents the type of companies that want to
of changing the design of the website to reflect the alleviate the load of performing certain types of work by
change in the business. Enter The Grid. The Grid is using A.I. instead of outsourcing. For example, instead of
designed to be a A.I. driven website builder. Users having a call center in an offshore location, a company
can have a call center at home manned by artificial
intelligence agents. This is a phenomenon that is bound
to become more and more prevalent as the range of
tasks that A.I. agents can perform continues to grow.

Summary
The companies shown in this small selection illustrate the
breadth of this emerging industry. And that breadth is
one of the key things one needs to understand about
the ambitions of this field. The vision for the people
behind VIV and a large part of the A.I. crowd is that this
upload raw content in the form of text, pictures and technology will be like a utility in the future. Much like we
other media. Then they specify the purpose of the now use electricity or water to solve problems, the hope
website, be it business, social or some other type. After is that intelligent computation will be a general resource
that, The Grid's engine takes care of the rest and in the same way. This way of looking at intelligent
compiles your input into a working website designed to computation really broadens the scope of what one
achieve what the web-site's owner wants, e.g. can imagine using this technology for.
promoting higher sales or new customers.

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5. A.I. IN BANKING

5 A.I. IN BANKING
The purpose of the preceding sections is to get the Perhaps even more interesting is the arrival of
reader thinking about how the technologies surveyed Wealthfront and Betterment. By automating large parts
could be tweaked and applied to banking. One of the wealth management process, they are able to
problem of technology with broad applications is that it offer personalized, tax optimized investments to clients
can be hard to know where to start applying it. Another who have far less in investable assets than what would
question is the maturity of the technology across usually qualify for professional wealth management.
application areas. Wealthfront have an minimum account size of $ 5000
and Betterment has no minimum account size. Both
Wealth Management for the masses companies' approach is based on asking the user
One of the banking areas that have seen a lot of questions about their financial goals, financial status
investment in machine intelligence is wealth etc., and from this deduce the optimal asset mix for the
management. Both incumbents and newcomers are client using analytics.
realizing that the digital shift that is happening in banking
will affect this sector. UBS, a Swiss heavy-weight in the
wealth management business, recently acquired a
seven year old startup called Sqreem after it held an
innovation competition that Sqreem won. Sqreem's forté
is automatic analysis of large amounts of unstructured New entrants are using
data with the purpose of detecting “typical” behavioral automation to cut the costs of
patterns. UBS's hope is that this engine will can offer offering wealth management
insights in how to best service their high-net-worth clients. services.

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Customer support/help desk advanced analytics more user friendly, in essence
This isn't really a banking specific area, but as it applies turning business analysts into potential data scientists
to banking I will include it here. Everyone hates being capable of performing sophisticated querying against
“next in line” on some phone call when all they want is available datasets. This is the explicit goal of Sensai,
just to have their online bank work etc. As speech another machine intelligence startup. They offer a
processing and natural language processing platform that will make it easier to collate data from
technologies mature, we are closing in on the day different sources. As Banking is one of the worlds most
where computers can handle most customer service data-intensive industries, and becoming ever more so,
questions for us. This would mean an end to the waiting the capability to actually analyze all this data will be of
in line, and happier customers. growing importance.

Advanced Analytics
Another area which has seen a lot of investment are is
the use of machine intelligence for advanced analytics.
An example of this is the young company Kensho, which
just received $ 15 million in funding from Goldman Sachs.
Kensho has built a natural language search engine A new generation of intelligent
capable of answering questions like “What happens to analytics companies address
stocks when inflation falls below 2 % and GDP growth is infrastructure concerns raised by
flat” or “Which stocks to buy when the oil price falls”. the arrival of Big Data.
While this does not seem like an application of
immediate importance for retail banking it's a good
example of how companies are trying to make

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5. A.I. IN BANKING

Fraud Detection
Most industries operating on the world wide web are
susceptible to fraudulent users, and banking is no Feedzai and SiftScience are
exception. As technological infrastructure grows more helping their customers catch
complex, so do the demands on those protecting over 89 % of fraud cases while
companies and people from fraud. Marc Goodman, reviewing only 1 % of customer
author of “Future Crimes” explains in his book that orders.
criminals are often the first to exploit emergent
technologies and turn their complexity against their
Underwriting
users. This has led to an arms race between online The newcomers in the underwriting business, like Zest
security providers and fraudsters involved in everything Finance, really cut to the heart of the business of
from email scams to credit card fraud. As security banking. Using as much data as they can get their
providers improve, the criminals change their ways. This hands on, in combination with advanced machine
moving target calls for platforms that can learn to learning algorithms, they are able to more effectively
identify changing patterns of fraud, which is what price personal credit risk. Their business model is based
companies like Feedzai and SiftScience is trying to do. By on helping lenders in different credit segments by
tracking thousands of signals in real time and sharing assessing their clients for them, and according to them
information across their network of clients they are able their Big Data model is a 40 % improvement over the
to help their customers catch over 89 % of fraud cases best-in-class industry score. One of Zest finance's
while reviewing only 1 % of customer orders. While philosophies is “All data is credit data”. That means that
SiftScience doesn't seem to have any banking clients at they track everything they legally can about the user, to
the moment, this way of thinking and doing fraud identify what interest rate he should pay. This includes,
detection is bound to spread to banks very soon. browser type, device, location, time, how long you

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 Steps forward
Banks in general are under threat by fintechs. A big
reason for this is the extent to which tech-startups
embrace the emerging AI technologies and leverage
them to outperform banks at their own game. The good
news for banks is that none of what these fintech
companies do is magic, it is simply new technology,
Over 2500 startups have Artificial
most of which can be bought, and some of it is even
Intelligence as a core part of their
free. By building internal competencies in the field of
business model.
data science and machine learning, banks can adopt
spend reading the conditions of the loan etc. The results the same AI tools currently used by fintechs. Take for
achieved by Zest Finance and their peers' algorithms example the wealth management companies like
imply that companies which fail to implement this type Wealthfront and Betterment. Building a solution like that
of thinking in their organization will eventually be faced for a Norwegian bank is more than doable. But that
with a massive competitive disadvantage. takes commitment from a high level in the organization,
and a realization that properly understanding the data
you have is growing in importance every single day.

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LABS PAGE 24
Labs
Labs is conducting research and experiments to evry.com/innovationlab
explore the future of financial services [email protected]

Labs research papers

Small Business First home buying Engaging the
Banking for Millennials Millennials
Small businesses are not often prioritised by Buying a home is the first major financial Millennials are not engaged with banks.
banks, even though they account for a event for the Millennials. Banks need to This paper brings insights to how banks
large part of the GDP in the Nordics. How recognize and alleviate the uncertainty can engage with this generation by
can banks create solutions that bring value experienced by Millennials when exploring their mindset, lifestyle and
for both small businesses and banks? designing digital services. needs.

Blockchain: Powering The New Wave of Big Data

the Internet of Value Artificial Intelligence in banking
Blockchain is poised to become a massive Artificial Intelligence is becoming Norwegian banks are not using their
disruptor for the financial world. This paper increasingly prevalent in our everyday lives. data to optimize their decision making
describes the technology, how it will alter This paper investigates the possible process and improve their business. This
the financial world, and a recommended implications of the rise of Artificial research explores the value of Big Data
strategy for financial institutions. Intelligence in the banking industry. in banking.

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We bring information to life