Good morning. Financial services companies are highly regulated but that doesn't mean they're not embracing AI. And that requires doubling down on security while still focusing on innovation, according to experts.
Cybercrime has become highly sophisticated and very profitable for perpetrators, Rajat Taneja, president of technology at Visa, said during a panel session at Fortune’s Brainstorm AI conference this week in San Francisco.
Visa, a Fortune 500 company, has spent more than $3 billion in the last decade to create an AI and data infrastructure geared for the future, Taneja said. It had to do so in a trustworthy and secure manner, with fraud prevention, payment security and cybersecurity at the heart of it for protection against constant attacks.
Visa began leaning into AI over 30 years ago, and currently manages about a billion transactions a day, Taneja said. “We went from good old fashioned AI to deep learning to neural networks to all the predictive AI to now leaning into generative AI,” he explained.
That’s why Taneja believes the use cases for AI can go beyond just cyber and fraud protection. For Visa, that means using AI to reinvent and rethink commerce—a change that will be as monumental as the arrival of e-commerce, he said.
“Now comes the opportunity to move from the hunt-and-peck era of shopping,” he said. That means consumers are still searching for products themselves and trying to figure out what to buy. We’re heading toward “the self-driving commerce era,” where AI takes away some of the mundane aspects of shopping, he explained.
The speed and breadth of AI implementation at financial services companies will vary, Pegah Ebrahimi, cofounder and managing partner of FPV Ventures, said during the panel session. Ebrahimi is a former CIO and COO at Morgan Stanley.
She posed a question to consider when creating AI-use cases: "Can you pick low-hanging fruit where you can drive a ton of efficiency, versus trying to go for the moon and trying to go for something that has a really high risk?”
Many companies are starting to go in this direction, she said. You can watch the panel session here.
Have a good weekend.
Sheryl Estrada
sheryl.estrada@fortune.com
The following sections of CFO Daily were curated by Greg McKenna.
