The Growing Relationship between AI & FinTech

From virtual assistants like Siri and Alexa growing ever more intelligent, to chatbots opening new doors in customer service automation, AI is having a transformative effect on the Canadian FinTech sector in a number of key ways, from application to awards culture.

Here are 3 key areas where we’re seeing major development.

Canadian FinTech and AI Awards

When there exists a healthy awards culture, more businesses will thrive to impress the competition, and thanks in part to this award, more businesses are putting their best foot forward in the FinTech sector, particularly when it comes to AI.

The Canadian FinTech and AI Awards are granted to new, up-and-coming FinTech companies in Canada that are less than four years old and demonstrate entrepreneurial success in FinTech.

Success is measured using several key analytics, including

• Innovative technology,
• Capturing a brand-new sector or market using FinTech,
• Disruption of a pre-existing service or market segment,
• Solving a particular technology need,
• Novel application of an existing product or service, or
• Gaining traction in the international marketplace.

Past winners of the award include Coinsquare, Flinks, and nudge — an AI analytics company specializing in relationship intelligence for sales leaders.

Nudge Analytics measures the impact of your sales team’s relationship-building activities to help your whole sales department improve pipeline performance and close deals. Nudge lets you identify pre-existing accounts with weak relationships — for example, one with only a single contact — and helps you put the train back on track.

Read more here if you’re interested in seeing which companies are making the biggest splash in the Canadian FinTech sector in both research and app-based application.

Advances in Mobile Banking

Most technological advancements fail to reach the economically disadvantaged or those not on the forefront of technological advancement. Digital adoption is growing at a massive global rate and banking tech in Canada is being amended to remove the friction usually associated with adoption.

Banks such as RBC are investing heavily in AI through digital teller technology, photographic guidance, videos in regional languages, and AI assistance through chatbots to help ease non-traditional users of new banking technology into the fold. Reaching a wider audience means that tech solutions in the field of finance and banking will become mainstream faster.

In fact, banks are already using AI-processed behavioral data to advise clients on which products to select and which goals to set.

Customer service automation apps

As natural language processing tech continues to evolve, consumers find it more and more difficult to distinguish between a chatbot and a human customer service rep. This allows bots to resolve more and more customer issues without human intervention.

The cofounders of Click Payments — a Toronto FinTech startup — are using their incredible new processing platform to help lower transaction fees while at the same time growing the digital economy.

This mobile app puts state-of-the-art technology to work to secure transactions in an encrypted chat platform.

Click provides the space for user to chat with a digital teller in a private, secure, and encrypted setting, allowing them to arrange transactions, and to leverage blockchain technology to find buying, selling, and digital currency exchange partners.