The Human Code

Unveiling the Future of AI in Financial Services w/ Alex Jimenez

Don Finley Season 1 Episode 4

Send us a text

This episode of The Human Code, hosted by Don Finley, features a conversation with Alex Jimenez from Backbase. They delve into how technology, especially in the realm of banking and finance, intersects with human ingenuity and shapes our future. Jimenez shares his personal journey from engineering to banking, highlighting his focus on the strategic implementation of technology in banking over the past 28 years. The discussion covers the transformative impact of smartphones, blockchain, AI, and digital transformation on banking and financial services. They explore both the potential and the challenges of technologies like blockchain and AI, emphasizing the importance of human-technology synergy. The conversation also touches on generative AI, the role of AI in augmenting human work, and the evolving interaction between humans and technology in professional and personal spheres. The episode concludes with reflections on the future of work and the societal adaptation to technological advancements.


00:00 Welcome to The Human Code: Unveiling the Intersection of Technology and Humanity

00:50 Diving Deep with Alex Jimenez: A Journey from Colombia to the Forefront of Banking and Tech

01:54 The Evolution of Banking: Smartphones, Blockchain, and AI Transforming the Industry

02:53 Exploring the Realities and Potential of Blockchain in Banking

04:23 AI in Finance: From Automated Trading to Risk Management

06:19 The Future of AI: Generative Models, Customer Service, and the Augmented Worker

17:07 Personal and Professional Insights: How AI and Technology Shape Our Lives

25:24 Embracing the Future: The Role of AI Across Industries and the Workforce

26:56 Closing Thoughts and the Continuous Journey of Technological Adaptation

Sponsored by FINdustries
Hosted by Don Finley

Don Finley:

Welcome to The Human Code, the podcast where technology meets humanity, and the future is shaped by the leaders and innovators of today. I'm your host, Don Finley, inviting you on a journey through the fascinating world of tech, leadership, and personal growth. Here, we delve into the stories of visionary minds who are not only driving technological advancement, but also embodying the personal journeys and insights that inspire us all. Each episode, we explore the intersections where human ingenuity meets the cutting edge of technology, unpacking the experiences, challenges, and triumphs that define our era. So, whether you're a tech enthusiast, an inspiring entrepreneur, or simply curious about the human narratives behind the digital revolution, you're in the right place. Welcome to The Human Code. I'm here with Alex Jimenez from Backbase, and we're going to talk about the intersection of humanity technology. But first, Alex, thank you so much for being with us today. And I'd also like to ask you, where, what got you to here? What got you to this moment in time?

Alex Jimenez:

Thanks for having me. What got me here? Oh do we have an hour for me to do my whole spiel of how I got

Don Finley:

it on UX. I

Alex Jimenez:

I'm going to go all the way back. I was born in Colombia and moved to the U. S. when I was 13 wanted to be an engineer, went to college for engineering, and then went into insurance, of course and I was at an insurance company for about 10 years got an MBA, and then I moved from the exciting world of insurance to the exciting world of banking but I did land in an interesting place in banking where I worked in strategy. And through the past 28 years in banking, I've been doing something to do with strategy, but for the past 15 years or so, it's really been this whole intersection of technology and new business models. So how is technology changing? And, I think the tipping point was the introduction of smartphones, true smartphones, the iPhone the Android phones that really changed the game. But then all the technology that came with that, right? Anything from blockchain to AI and things like that have impacted and continue to impact the industry significantly more than we had seen in the previous 20, 30 years. Not that, Things hadn't changed, but so I've been in this weird place that, I my, my experience has been pretty much within a bank and then suddenly I'm talking about technology and I'm not a technologist, just someone who really likes technology. That's, so that's how I landed here, right? I talk about technology, I talk about digital transformation. I talk about what banks, credit unions wealth management firms need to do to change. And what is in the horizon, and it's a lot of exciting stuff, a lot of scary stuff, too.

Don Finley:

Do you see what is driving some of the transformation? Blockchain is a fantastic piece of technology that also has a lot of approach to where you can apply it. But some organizations are jumping full borehead and others are a little bit more hesitant and waiting for more use cases to come about. Is driving that implementation?

Alex Jimenez:

Blockchain is a different, it's a different animal from the other things, Because there's a lot of promise and blockchain and, I think the original white paper that described Bitcoin is a brilliant piece of strategic thinking and thinking about the future and thinking how we would deal with money in the future. 10 years later, we haven't really put it, put a dent on anything. We've talked a lot about blockchain. We've talked a lot about how it's going to change the industry. And it just really hasn't because of those use cases haven't really been proven out. That's probably a technology that still has prospects, but it's still yet too early, believe it or not.

Don Finley:

And it's interesting. I asked that question first because it is. Something near and dear to my heart as well. And we've done some blockchain implementations where the ones that succeeded were cross organizational

Alex Jimenez:

Yeah, they have to

Don Finley:

and ha it has to be right. like the ones that were basically somebody in a silo saying, this is what the market needs didn't really work out too well for that part, for the same reason of it's, I think it's a change in paradigm that people have to get to along with the technology. able to fully adopt it. Now, I think we're, we can go into another piece of technology as well, which is the AI side of it. And we're seeing a lot of adoption in many different areas because it can be done from a single organization. Where do you see the benefits of this and the driving factors or what is, what does the future look like for you?

Alex Jimenez:

Let's set aside generative AI for a second because really the banking insurance and other financial and wealth management and investing have been users of AI for quite a while, Over a decade. And it all depends on how you define AI too, right? If you take it a very broad definition that includes all algorithms, we go back, long, long time. The application of. Some form of AI to the industry. In investing, we have bots that are continually looking at the market and have automated a whole bunch of things that used to be done by people, it's funny last year, I think it was actually the year before I got a chance to go to wall street and go to the New York stock exchange. And you have the picture of the people out there yelling and so on. That room does not exist anymore, right? The room is there. All the technology is there. The brokers are still there, but it's a really quiet environment because a lot of that stuff was automated right now. A lot of that stuff is, in a very broad terms, AI and in the banking world. And in the insurance world, we've been using AI for risk management, whether it is to underwrite loans and insurance policies to looking at fraud and possible fraud that's impacting you looking at payments, transactions, and so on. We have been using AI for a long it's funny that, last. A year ago with the introduction of generative AI to the broad world that suddenly everyone's talking about AI and everyone's saying how we're going to use AI, but, this industry has already been doing it for a long time. How generative AI is going to work. Is going to impact it is one of the situations that it's still too early. And the the application of generative AI on a customer service is the one that everybody comes up with. But we, the hallucinations that we see a lot of these tools have it is clear that we're not ready. In industries that are highly regulated and that is true as well and in healthcare and other industries and organizations have jumped the gun have, strap on chat to something and things have blown up and they haven't been able to get the benefits that they thought they would get. So it's still early. Yes, it's going to impact it. Yes, it's going to be significantly different. So let's look at five years out and, we'll be looking back and saying, oh, my God, can you believe all these things that have changed just like we can do today? I am looking back in 5 years or 10 years, so it's coming, but it has been coming for a long time.

Don Finley:

Now, how do you see, and I 100 percent agree with you, right? Like we AI and GPUs really hit around 2013. so the explosion of convolutional neural networks and image classification was that first use case that we saw coming up. But we had an AI winter for, at least. Basically 30, 40 years before that, like my education is in computer science with an AI focus and I was just basically learning about stuff that we couldn't do on a computer, right? Or could do it really slow, not practical kind of thing. But AI covers both expert systems all the way to like the generative AI that we're seeing today. And so

Alex Jimenez:

Mm-Hmm.

Don Finley:

The work that we were doing, while not as sexy as what it is today, was still, consequential for what we were doing before. And like financial services definitely has been a leading edge on the application of it because even these systems that were, coming out five, 10 years ago, could have a tremendous impact on, financials or on the financials of the bank and of the systems as well. So I totally agree with you. What I'm curious about is where you see this going from an individual like worker perspective who's working in the bank and how the technology can impact them.

Alex Jimenez:

Yeah. Be, before I answer that I, Chuck, I had to chuckle because when I have a degree in mechanical engineering on my, in my my senior thesis was in robotics. And so this is in the eighties, and I was, I. It did this study of how you use industrial robots and so on. And of course, it had control by, automated systems, which was early version of AI. And it was the same thing, right? In the eighties, we had all these promise of all the things that were going to happen. And robotics has changed quite a bit since then, but it hasn't changed to the point that we couldn't have said. That we, what we thought in the eighties was going to happen. It's still developing. So same thing with AI anyway as far as what's going on and what may happen I see a lot of organizations. Thinking about how they can replace that say their contact centers with but it's clear that, like I said, the current large language models. That I train on, this huge data that generally comes from the Internet in, in, in total and, and think about Reddit and and Twitter and Facebook feeding this model that what you're going to get is not going to be great responses. So certainly there's the the idea that, okay, I had the model. I have the way that it works now. I'm going to train it on my own. information. But yet, if you're going to train on your information, we're no longer talking about a huge, massive training data set. And therefore, it's not going to be as rich as the responses you get from ChatGPT. They might be better than what you would get from ChatGPT, but they're not, the scale is significantly different. So we're way too early to say, Hey, just drop on this large language model and we'll close. I think the more interesting piece for me is the whole idea of the augmented worker and I'll give you an example. I used to run a call center. Actually I didn't run the call center reported up to me, but we had Agents that they, they're supposed to start working on, say, 9 o'clock in the morning. They had to be on, they had to be at their desk a quarter to 9, because it was going to take them 15 minutes to log into all the 16 systems that they needed to be logged on. To be ready to take that very first call, because you don't know what kind of call you're going to get now. I used to say this and people are like, oh, my God, 16. Just recently, I took to a credit union that actually has 25 systems. And we've had this idea of doing. Being able to take all these systems, put them into one place and being able to serve customers with that in a, so CRMs were supposed to sell, solve that problem. And in some cases, it has been able to address the problem. Okay. I only need to sign on to 12 instead of 25 systems. But the problem still is. The scale of the kind of questions you get from your clients. It could be a very specific question on your account, or it could be a very esoteric question on something that you have ever have never seen. And you have to go and find somebody with an answer. The idea of having a large language model that can help you. give you hints pointed to the right place to go to, to answer a question beyond just a knowledge base with a search engine is something very attractive for a a contact center or someone providing service to our customer. And I like the idea of being an agent just actually. The A. I listening to the phone call and why, while the agents also listening to the phone call that you get a pop up on your screen that gives you all the information without you actually searching, right? That is, the technology for that is entirely available today, right? How you build that? How do you make it appropriate? It's something that can be used on the other hand. Those agents can then start helping that model to get better. So at some point you can actually turn it on and be able to be accessible to a client on, a website or some other format. But the idea of having someone who's going to, a system that's going to be your assistant, that's going to help you through that experience. Is one that I think it's has more promise than just replacing the human. Same thing for sales. I think a similar sort of thing could be available in person and online. Where someone is trying to do a sale and, you're being prompted with the appropriate information and so on. We a few years ago, I attested something like that with a very specific problem we had at a bank where we would get questions. From clients on a product we wanted to sell. And, we would train the, we would train the branch people on the product. And since they didn't get that question from a client on a regular basis, by the time that happened, they just didn't remember it. And then they're fumbling through their notes and being able to answer the question. We did a very simple algorithm that was available to a person that would walk you through a process to answer those questions. And that was widely successful. We actually use the same thing and put it on our website to walk someone through that process, and it was a. Terrible failure. And the difference really wasn't the data. The difference was the human experience because the bottom line was, yes, you could get the same answer by going through the website but you would have to ask Something like, 10 questions to get there. If you're with a person, that person can have a conversation. They may actually wind up asking you eight questions to get there, but it's a conversation. It doesn't feel like you're just clicking over and typing stuff, right? It just has that whole feeling of a personal experience.

Don Finley:

it reminds me of a study that was done by Citibank and not Citibank. It was Chase and McDonald's. When we were first going to tap and go, and the whole experience of the transaction for tapping and going was very positive. experience. of getting your burger though, the satisfaction dropped because now instead of you being tied up, exchanging money or swiping and like having to go through the steps. That transaction time shrunk to almost nothing and now you're just waiting for something to come. And so there is an importance about maintaining that human connection in our relationships, in our business transactions, because it, does lead to a more satisfying outcome for your customer. That's really good.

Alex Jimenez:

there's an interesting thing that's coming up in some of the studies that I've seen lately about Gen Zers and how they want to interact with organizations and specifically with banks in a couple of surveys. I've seen particularly one that my former firm did and has done the. The the Gen Zers are more likely to go to a branch to have, the real basic conversations about how do I manage my checking account? And part of that is cause we do a terrible job of teaching that for young people. But the other part is. They want to talk to a person, they want to talk to an adult. They might be 25 years old, but they still want to talk to an adult on something like this. And so while, Gen Xers and millennials might be more confident already with some of this technology, there is that room for. Getting younger people to understand something and they need some, a person to do that. And so it's weird to see numbers that say Gen Zers are more likely to go to a branch than say a boomer, because we have always thought that as us, the older people that go to the branches, the young people just want something on their mobile phone. It depends on the situation, but. In banking, there's still a need for that person, personal connection, and it may be replaced by a video like we're doing right now. But it's still a person, the personal touch, right? I think the augmented individual with AI is something that we're going to see more and more. And I and I think in just a few years, everybody's going to have an assistant. The digital assistant that maybe it's an app on your phone. That's going to help you with all kinds of things. And then instead of me going to Delta and booking a flight, I'll just tell my assistant, I want to go to Chicago on this day. Can you can get my travel done right. And it'll do it.

Don Finley:

So where do you see, what use case has you most excited about the implementation of technology and either your personal life or in the business setting?

Alex Jimenez:

So when chat GPT was introduced to the general public, I've been reading about the open AI and what they have been doing and what the large language models were doing, but I never had the chance to play with them. There's a great level of entertainment by just. Playing with Chad GPT and and then if you also look at some of the graphical generative AI like DALI, et cetera there's a lot of fun going on with that. But as you can see from the, some of the DALI pictures with people with 15 fingers and three legs we know that it's not there yet, but it's getting really close. I think. The individual entertainment value when we actually start getting things that are individualized to you is fun. Exciting. I don't think it'll necessarily replace movies or TV. I think it'd just be yet another additional thing that you can do. To me that's exciting. I think that's going to be fun. Personally and one of the things that I've used chat GPT for is really just ideate and sometimes I would sit down to try to do, if I'm writing something, I'm writing an article or thinking through something I. Sometimes I struggle to just get the format or get the, the, how I'm going to tell a story. So I've gone to chat GPT and, prompted it to give me something. And don't know, about six months ago, I did that. I needed to write an article about something. So I did that. I just said, write me a 2000 word article about blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And he wrote it, it brought it out. At first glance, I thought this is great. I don't have to do anything. Second read, it's okay, hold on. It's repeating the same thing several times with different words. But what it helped me, it was just get me going. So I actually just started editing that. Next thing I know, I'm just writing it out, right? At the end of the day, I had a 1, 500 Word article that was published chat GPT wrote a total of one sentence that I actually left because it was perfect, but everything else I wrote and everything else I replaced from what it gave me, but it got me going. I think personally, that was really helpful. And I, you can see that sort of thing. Again that's the whole idea of being the augmented human, right? Augmented with this, sidekick that you have, but

Don Finley:

We've been playing around with open AI and GPT for a couple of years, but chat GPT came out and that format and that presentation just really sealed the deal on like how powerful these models will become. Because we were making an update to our website. And that process of who creates the website copy, who creates the actual website to passing it along used to take us a couple of weeks just because of all the back and forth that goes on. But it was myself, a designer and chat GPT, and we got it all done within a day because of that back and forth. And like you said, it wasn't about chat, GPT writing it. was basically, I now had a collaborative partner that really was working at a pace that I could work at and was really focused on everything that like I was asking and could help me shape my vision before I passed it off. And it was more like, Hey, I've got a really amazing intern here is helping out a wide base of knowledge

Alex Jimenez:

Sorry, interns,

Don Finley:

What's

Alex Jimenez:

sorry, interns,

Don Finley:

Exactly. So many interns. we're just so popular, but I see it as that kind of relationship at first, right? Like you're, you've got to figure out how to interact with the tool. And at the same time, knowing that the tool is really capable, but also has some significant flaws that will be brushed out over time and then on the other side, and In areas where I'm not an expert for example, like marketing isn't my strong point as a person. I use chat GPT to lead me down a path that it may be a little bit more structured than what I understand at first. So Yeah,

Alex Jimenez:

Yeah, absolutely. I do see though, a lot of people, organizations going down the path of saying, okay, because I, it writes something that seems correct. That I'm going to go ahead and use it. There's a bunch of examples. So CNET, for example which was a a publisher that I would read a lot of technology articles on. I no longer do that because they got rid of their staff and they replaced it with AI and those articles are now junk. And they've said that they're backing away from that. But so far I haven't seen, I haven't seen that. You have the example of what happened with Air Canada when they deployed a chat GBT Power, I think it was Chad powered, but some sort of AI powered chat bot. that gave the wrong information to a customer, which then resulted in a suit, which Air Canada lost. And it was all because they thought, hey, this is, this gives advice that seems correct, but it's actually just grammatically correct. It doesn't actually have data that's correct. So you gotta be careful. And I, I see all tons, I see a lot of articles written that says, chat GPT says, this is going to be the value of Bitcoin in six months. Chad GPT doesn't know anything more than any of us and what where Bitcoin is going. I saw an article about a gentleman in London who asked Chad GPT to plan his Portugal trip. Vacation and then just did whatever Chad GPT did. And he said it was a terrible vacation because a lot of the things that he went to do are, were either not available. We're not, it didn't make any sense. He was supposed to, he was going to do three things in one day happened that they were all, There were in separate parts of Portugal and he couldn't go from here to there in the right amount of time, which of course, you know, once I read, I was like of course, why didn't you even check, you just decided you were just going to follow through. People need to understand the limitations of the tool today. Will those tools be different in a year, 10 years? Of course. Will they be able to do more things? Yes. And we as humans need to figure out how we can work along with those tools.'cause at the end of the day, is a tool just like we learn how to deal with cars and how do we deal with computers. And, I'm old enough to remember that when personal computers were introduced lots of people were gonna lose their jobs. And the reality was most of those people didn't lose their jobs. There were some jobs that were heavily impacted. I'm thinking, the old typing pool, for example, that is a thing that most people don't even know what that is anymore, right? Those the people who just did typing, I, that was a job that doesn't exist anymore, and a lot of that has to do with the introduction of personal computing, it'll be the same, but we'll evolve

Don Finley:

We're seeing this progression of, back in the typing pool days, if you wanted to make$10 million a year, you probably had 50 people in your organization. And fast forward to the personal computer that trimmed it down, we moved things to the cloud and specialized services that we could interact with. And you went down to 10 million, could be done with 10 people. You could do 10 million with one person today. And Sam Altman was on stage talking about how. At a certain point, he and his CEO buddies are betting on when you'll see a billion dollar company run by one person.

Alex Jimenez:

one person.

Track 1:

And that's the, what this technology could free up. It is an exciting time to, to see how, we're now in a point where the tool could possibly making decisions alongside of us. I never had to worry about the, my, my garden rake making a decision for me. But now. Like you said, we have somebody who's planning a vacation using these tools and it's not showing the best of judgment because it doesn't really have reasoning capabilities

Alex Jimenez:

Exactly.

Track 1:

it.

Alex Jimenez:

Yeah,

Track 1:

I, Alex, I gotta say, I really appreciate the time that you've taken today to speak with us and it's been fun. Is there anything else that I've, haven't been able to ask you about your vision on the future or to share with the

Alex Jimenez:

yeah, one of the things that we always talk about is how it's going to impact the white collar world. The people working in offices, it'll impact everybody. I the idea of having Your sidekick, as I said earlier, when you're a plumber or something like that, all those things will happen, right? Just, that's top of mind. Cause I, I had a plumber come to the house a couple of days ago and he had an iPad with him and he used it for payments and so on. But Hey, that iPad could be used for many more things. He finds something that is not something he's seen before. He can use it to answer that question and so on. So it's exciting what it can do, how it can help, how it can help everyone. And yes, as an as a culture, we all need to figure out how we're going to work with it, shape it. And moving forward I don't think we're going to have, half the working population suddenly out of a job. It'll be a gradual change and everybody will change with it.

Track 1:

I definitely agree with you. There's, we'll find ways to adapt,

Alex Jimenez:

absolutely.

Track 1:

to embrace this. Along the blue collar side, my furnace went down the other day, and I took the panel off, snapped a picture of the blinking lights, and then sent it off to chatGBT, and I was like, Hey, what's going on with this? And it surprisingly was able to at least guide me in the right direction.

Alex Jimenez:

Oh, good. I wouldn't touch it. I would make it worse.

Track 1:

call, I actually did still call a professional, but at the same time, it gave me enough information to tell the professional Hey, here's

Alex Jimenez:

Yeah, that's awesome. Yeah, that's

Track 1:

Amazing. Alex, once again, Thank you so much for, being here with us today and looking forward to more conversations.

Alex Jimenez:

Great. Thank you for having me.

Track 1:

Not a problem.

Don Finley:

Thank you for tuning into The Human Code, sponsored by FINdustries, where we harness AI to elevate your business. By improving operational efficiency and accelerating growth, we turn opportunities into reality. Let FINdustries be your guide to AI mastery, making success inevitable. Explore how at FINdustries. co.

People on this episode