Banking on Data

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Very few people seem to express warm, fuzzy feelings about banks. In fact, they are more  20 point drop in public trust in 2018. 

likely to have cold, prickly feelings about them. Financial services institutions suffered a

So what can banks do to try to attract and retain loyalty? Aside from asking banking customers directly, how would banks find out what people really think of what they’re doing? They could tap into social data. That’s what Crimson Hexagon did with in a report that compares two bank brands: BNP Paribas and Santander. 

The report is based on an exploration of five years’ worth of online conversations related to these two large bank brands.  Data was culled from “Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, blogs and forums – a wide range of locations where consumers gather to discuss various topics.” 

Read more in 

Data You Can Bank On

A virtual assistant you can bank on

In early 2016, SEB, one of Sweden's largest banks with a presence in 20 countries around the globe, started integrating Amelia, an artificial intelligence (AI) platform from IPsoft, into its help desk. Amelia is represented by a blond female avatar and is always referred to as "she" rather than "it."

The artificial intelligence platform is built on semantic understanding, which enables Amelia to interact with users through natural language to determine what actions to take in order to answer a question, fulfill a request or solve a problem. She is also designed to learn through observation.

At SEB, Amelia serves as a customer interface with automated interactions that can scale up to meet expanded support needs. "The driver is to find a way to improve the experience for our customers," explains Mikael Andersson, the bank's IT strategy transformation lead.

- See more at: http://www.baselinemag.com/innovation/banking-on-ai-to-offer-better-customer-service.html#sthash.Mk05GLW5.dpuf

Keeping your identity

Clones, robots, alien shapeshifters, or disembodied consciousness take over people's identities in shows such as Star Trek and Doctor Who. They can then take over the lives of the people they've duplicated, particularly when they have access to their memories. How can anyone defend himself when he can't tell friend from foe?

In real life, most of us don't fear having someone else show up in person claiming to be us. But we are concerned about identity theft. Our digital world makes it all too easy for the bad guys to hack into personal information posted online, as well as financial information that we can think is secure. The cost of identity theft can be huge when hackers get access to our credit cards, debit cards, and bank accounts.

Read more in Your Personal Online Guardian

Misplacing a valued client

Citibank was nice enough FedEx me an illustration of a misplaced modifier. The letter begins: "As a valued client, we recently mailed a letter to you regarding an incredible opportunity to receive relief on your mortgage payment through Home Affordable Refinance Program. " As far as grammar is concerned, we only need to focus on the first five words. The way the sentence is set up the first four words are a description that should be followed by what they modify, but instead, they are followed by the pronoun "we," that is the entity that makes up Citibank, which is not its own valued client. 

To make the sentence work grammatically, Citibank could have opened with something like thins, "Because we value you as a client, we want to let you know about an incredible opportunity," or something along those lines.

For more on misplaced modifiers, see http://www.infoplease.com/cig/grammar-style/misplaced-modifiers-lost-found.html and my favorite grammar site, Purdue OWL,

Seeing stones for military, rescue, and security operations

What do JRR Tolkien, JP Morgan Chase, the military, and rescue workers have in common? Palantir.

"The Palantír" is the title of the 11th chapter of Tolkien’s The Two Towers. The name refers to the "seeing stones" that allow one to view what is happening elsewhere. In 2004, the name was also taken on by a company that develops software organization to extract meaning from various streams of data to combat terrorism, fraud, and disaster damage.

Palantir distinguishes its approach from data mining by calling it "data surfacing." Read more at 

From Sorcery to Surfacing Data

For more on big data used by the army, see  

National Safety in Big Numbers

 "You can't have a data Tower of Babel" in which each system keeps its data isolated from other systems, Patrick Dreher, a senior technical director at DRC, told Military Information Technology.His company worked with the US Army on the Rainmaker cloud-based intelligence system, which integrates different data models used by the intelligence community. "For example, when Afghan drug lords finance Taliban insurgents, data from one database can be combined with Taliban financing data from an Army database inside the cloud, allowing analysts to make timely, critical connections and stay one step ahead of insurgents."