BIZ BUZZ: AI school beckons to bankers
East West Banking Corp. CEO Jerry Ngo may be a seasoned global banker who had worked across overseas markets like Singapore, South Korea, Indonesia, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.
But these days, he is once again a wide-eyed learner who’s excited to “go back to school”, together with a number of his executives at EastWest Bank. Fifteen of them, including next-generation leader Isabelle Yap (chief strategy/transformation officer and executive director of EastWest), are taking the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Strategy for Senior Executives five-month online program at the National University of Singapore (NUS).
This is after sending the bank’s IT leaders to NUS as well.
“The nature and ways of working are changing dramatically, right? And that’s something that we are investing heavily in,” Ngo said during a dinner hosted by Filinvest group on Wednesday night.
His cohort is now on their 15th week of assignments, which means saying goodbye to leisurely weekends for now.
“But I think that’s really important. We are looking at how we reimagine banking as we go forward,” he said.
The bank is looking at a broad-based organizational transformation.
“Its not what about AI is able to do because sa totoo lang (in truth), it could do a lot. It’s all about how humans will allow it to be. It’s the permission, and the permission will have to be given based on trust. At the end of the day, maybe it will still be people to people,” he explained.
He said the bank was focused on enhancing the customer journey.
AI can likewise be deployed to sharpen risk analytics, design propensity models for marketing and create pitches, among others.
“We are looking at it at enterprise-wide workflows, but also looking at smaller workflows like in compliance. When BSP (Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas) issues a new regulation, for example, just ingest them, and map to our own processes, applications and procedures. It will make it a lot easier,” he said.
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