ShareKUWAIT: National Bank of Kuwait (NBK) participated in the ‘Cloud Day 2024’ hosted by Google Cloud discussing the ways to collectively contribute to accelerating Kuwait’s digital transformation journey. The event was attended by Kuwait’s Minister of State for Communication Affairs Omar Al-Omar, and witnessed the participation of Mohammad Al-Kharafi, COO - Head of Group Operations and Information Technology at NBK as a panelist in an insightful panel around the Generative AI impact in every industry.
The panel shed light on how Generative AI can help NBK strengthen its fraud detection mechanisms and enhance security measures in financial transactions. Al-Kharafi said he believes that the future of banking is very exciting, as Generative AI brings huge potential for delivering highly personalized, tailor-made financial advice and this will revolutionize how banks engage with their customer.
“Human oversight is also critical. There should always be a pilot behind the wheel,” he emphasized. Al-Kharafi stated that NBK created an “AI Control Function” Working Group, which includes experts from different parts of the bank ... control, technology and strategy areas of the bank who’s purpose to work through different scenarios from cloud to on premise, Machine Learning and LLM’s to ensure NBK maximizes the AI opportunity safely and securely.
The panel tackled Personalized Financial Advice, especially with the rise of robo-advisors and personalized finance, as Al-Kharafi mentioned, “At NBK, we have our SmartWealth Robo Advisory app, which has been launched and available for a few years now. It does not utilize Gen AI yet, but it is algorithm-based and offers very personalized financial advice, and it creates a custom investment portfolio for the customer based on their aspirations and risk appetite. Very intuitive, straight forward and simple to use.”
“Our focus remains on automating our operations through robotics. We have more than 155 digital workers/bots aiding our employees in reducing response times and ensuring accurate services. The digitization efforts have yielded significant benefits, saving approximately 200,665 working hours for our employees and reducing transaction processing time by up to 90.4 percent,” he explained.
“NBK Group Operations and IT organizes a quarterly program titled “Innovation Lab”, which serves as provides an incubator to help stimulate employees’ creativity to provide innovative solutions for challenges simulating their work nature in the bank. At the end of the program, the participant with the best idea is named and honored,” he highlighted. “RPA has a crucial role in banking operations, as it improves efficiency, simplifies operations, and propels the industry to higher levels of innovation,” he concluded.
