How are banks thinking about artificial intelligence?
Last week we published a landmark report on banks’ cross-border payments operations, which saw us comb through the earnings of 13 major banks going back to the start of 2021. As part of that research, we also collected some insights into their discussion of artificial intelligence, which we are sharing this week.
As part of the broader report, we looked at a variety of keyword mentions for the quarterly earnings call transcripts of all 13 banks covered between Q1 2021 and Q2 2024. This provided a variety of insights into how frequently banks discuss cross-border payments in such earnings – often for some but far less so for others – which we cover in the report, but it also allowed us to track how discussion of artificial intelligence has changed.
By analysing the mentions of ‘AI’ or ‘artificial intelligence’ across all 13 banks’ transcripts for all 13 quarters, we found that the rate of mentions has risen significantly between H1 2021 and H1 2024. While in the first half of 2021 only three of the 13 banks mentioned AI at all, with a total of six mentions across them, by the first half of 2024 this had risen to 38 mentions across seven different banks.
Out of the 13, 10 mentioned AI at least once over the analysed period – with Barclays, Standard Chartered and Societe Generale being the exceptions – but there was considerable variation in the number of mentions. BNP Paribas discussed AI the most, at 46 times, followed by Bank of America (32), with JPMorgan Chase (22) in third and Goldman Sachs (13) and Wells Fargo (13) joint fourth.
The use of artificial intelligence has become an increasingly popular focus of discussion over the past few years across payments, financial services and beyond, particularly following the emergence of OpenAI’s ChatGPT and wider generative AI technologies. Recent bank technologies have largely focused on its use to help transform operations, although precise applications are both broad and variable.
In its most recent earnings call, BNP Paribas discussed using generative AI across roughly 150 different use cases as part of a wider digitisation-focused transformation journey for the bank. Bank of America, meanwhile, discussed its use of an AI-based advisor and client insights tool, while Goldman Sachs discussed the financial opportunities inherent in its proliferation in the corporate world, particularly around infrastructure and finance.
Read ‘The state of cross-border payments in banking 2024’
