As part of our mission to empower Filipinos everywhere, we prioritize addressing customer needs to improve their financial health
PHOTOGRAPH BY john henry dodson for the daily tribune Adrienne Heinrich of Union Bank says that good AI players can only be certain about one thing: That bad AI users would never stop finding loopholes to exploit and scam people.
SINGAPORE — The ethical use of artificial intelligence, or AI, in the deadly serious one-upmanship game played by financial companies against hackers and other malevolent players in the digital world, cast a long and tall shadow at the start Wednesday of the 2023 Singapore FinTech Festival.
Buzzwords like privacy, security, inclusiveness, transparency, and accountability reverberated within the many halls where the biggest names in the fintech sector, including Union Bank of the Philippines, have put up displays to fight for the attention of attendees in the world's biggest tech-centric financial forum.
"As part of our mission to empower Filipinos everywhere, we prioritize addressing customer needs to improve their financial health. With CLPI, we can do that by addressing the financial sustainability of the mass market," UnionDigital Bank president and CEO Henry Aguda told Filipino journalists.
"Our strategic partnerships amplify this impact by enabling us to understand our customer's behavior more and enhance our products based on that. These advantages align with our support for the government's pursuit of more partnerships to foster growth in the Philippine fintech ecosystem," he added.
By CLPI, Aguda was referring to the Union Bank group's proprietary framework, the Customer Lifetime Prosperity Index, a metric that gauges or gives a snapshot of customers' financial health to offer them tailor-made services and products.
Before noon, President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., presently in San Francisco, United States to attend the APEC Summit, made a surprise appearance at SFF 2023, delivering its keynote address by way of a hologram in the darkened presentation of the festival ending on Friday.
Marcos emphasized that the Philippines would not be left behind in the shift to digitalization of global and consumer-side trade as he cited strategic collaborations being made in the country to transform it into a hub for digital innovation and entrepreneurship.
Both local and global partnerships are being made in the Philippines by the public and private sectors, the President pointed out, to adopt new technologies seen to strengthen the country's fintech ecosystem.
Admitting there are still a lot of underserved communities in the Philippines, Marcos cited the need to enhance the financial literacy of Filipinos through inclusion initiatives. He credited the government's Private Sector Advisory Council for its GoDigital Pilipinas Movement toward a more financially inclusive society.
AI-powers for banking
With its two-level exhibit, Union Bank showcased AI-powered solutions that are intended to better service its clients while addressing the threat of scammers victimizing people transacting online. It said it is collaborating with other fintech movers to enhance access to digital bank products.
The bank said it has partnered with, among others, local motorcycle taxi company Angkas, the health app mWell and Air Asia's e-wallet app Bigpay.
Now on its eighth edition, the Singapore FinTech Festival focuses on AI and "re-architecting the financial system" as nations prepare for future risks in technology amid the increasing attack surface being exploited by bad players.
For Adrienne Heinrich, head of the AI innovation center of Union Bank, financial companies are taking advantage of artificial intelligence but admitted that those victimizing them are also using AI.
Heinrich explained that AI, at its present implementation, also presents its problems when it engages in "hallucinatory" responses like those seen by users of the writing AI ChatGPT.
With Ana Manalac, head of data ventures and insights; and Julie Ann Dela Cruz, head of data science solutions of the UB group, Heinrich explained that they have come up with AI-powered projects like voice recognition intended to thwart digital attacks.
"We hope to roll out by next year a voice recognition
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