Will artificial intelligence replace bank tellers, accountants and financial analysts or will it become part of the team to make banking safer and faster than ever?
The second Fintech & Digital Assets Workshop, also known as UTD COMTECH, answered these questions and more. Held Feb. 21 at the Davidson-Gundy Alumni Center, it was organized by the Center for the Management of Financial and Digital Asset Technologies (FD-Tech Center) at the Naveen Jindal School of Management. The event focused on how new technologies are disrupting the financial services industry and forcing companies to make changes they may not be comfortable making.
Paul Brody, principal and global blockchain leader at EY, was the keynote speaker.
“We are headed into what I think of as the great long crypto summer,” Brody said. “My own personal forecast is that this summer will probably last somewhere in the range of 20 to 25 years.”
A panel of experts dove into the impact generative-AI will have in the financial services and healthcare spaces — at least once trust is developed between it and the humans working alongside it. Moderated by Karthik Kumar, COO of LendArch, it consisted of Chinmoy Banerjee, president of Hexaware Technologies; Michele Kryczkowski, head of retail operations at Citi; and Dr. Steven Haynes, an associate professor of practice at the Jindal School and director of the Risk Management and Cyber Security concentration of the BS in Business Administration program.
“We’re looking at generative AI as being a colleague in the workplace,” Haynes said. “It’s not just that we’re looking to replace somebody; it’s actually we’re trying to strengthen the relationship of a person who’s filling a job in the workplace to knowledge-based solutions.”
Kryczkowski implored management to balance the system and people during the AI implementation process and to let the people be free to do what they are going to do anyway.
“For a while, they’re going to also check the system,” she said. “They… do not trust the output of what comes out… They can’t imagine that something does a better job than what they’ve been doing the last 30 years.”
Kryczkowski emphasized the importance of bringing along the most skeptical person on the team during that process.
“If I can convince that one person, everyone else will be like, ‘Oh… he or she really likes this thing.’ So, striking the balance is key.”
Chinmoy Banerjee highlighted the core issue of trust between humans and AI when he described a critical healthcare procedure.
“Sure, some scan can tell you that you don’t have cancer or you have low probability of cancer, but would you be satisfied with that?” he said. “You’d want… a guy… with 30 years of experience (to) tell you, ‘Hey, don’t worry about it.’”
Another panel of experts debated whether AI will make banking safer or just create a whole new set of risks. It was moderated by Judge David Rippel of Collin County and featured Nagendra P. Bandaru, president and member of the executive board at Wipro Enterprise Futuring; Michele Buschman, CIO at American Pacific Mortgage; and Deborah Barnes, BS’02, MS’04, PhD’07, head of bank data management and transformation at USAA.
Barnes said one focus area of her company has been on using AI with the internal knowledge bases to improve the customers’ experiences when they interact with customer service.
“So processes and procedures and making the customer-facing representatives’ lives easier,” she said. “They deal with a lot of complex systems and moving between systems and writing things down on a notepad and you know, there’s just a lot of still manual things that they have to do. So I think that’s a big focus is the copilot for the individual customer service representative is a big area.”
With the next panel, the conversation shifted to cryptocurrencies — digital money that operates without the banks calling the shots. It was moderated by Lee Bratcher, PhD’24, president and Founder of the Texas Blockchain Council. Panelists were Lane Kasselman, president of Blockchain.com; Mance Harmon, chairman of the board at Hashgraph and co- founder of Hedera; Chris Davis, partner at Gray Reed and the group leader of the law practice’s government-investigations and compliance practice; and Lakshmi Narayanan, chairman of Sovereign Wealth Fund Institute and principal at Patel Family Office.
Narayanan described the already deep penetration of certain cryptocurrencies into the financial services sector, specifically, stablecoins, or digital assets that are backed by other assets such as gold or government-issued currency.
“In the last 30 days, more than $5 trillion worth of stablecoin has been transacted,” he said. “In the last 12 months, more than $30 trillion worth of stablecoin has been transacted. The transaction of stablecoin has exceeded Visa’s transactions. So one use case has built that penetration has changed the game.”
The workshop continued with presentations by Dr. Vijay Mookerjee, director of the FD-Tech Center, and Dr. Eric Zheng, associate director of the FD-Tech Center. Their presentations centered on research being conducted by the center as it relates to cryptocurrencies, which speed up banking activity to real time while increasing accuracy and compliance as compared to non-AI methods.
“The big picture is that there will be a disruption if reconciliation time goes to 0 and the disruption will be (that) banks will be partially disintermediated (i.e. the middleman being cut out of the process), but they’ll have to react with clever strategies and they may be probably doing that as we speak,” Mookerjee.
Both men also served as workshop chairs, along with Dr. Gaurav Shekhar, senior assistant dean for graduate programs at the Jindal School, and Bratcher and Kumar, who are members of the FD-Tech Center’s advisory board.
The closing keynote speaker was Dan Sinawat, founder and CEO of AI Connex, a Frisco, Tex.-based company that offers AI integration to businesses. He noted his company’s tagline — AI transformation is your businesses evolution — to emphasize that technology should not lead business, but rather that business should be the emphasis.
“AI is 95% business, 5% technical. If anybody comes to you talking LLM (large-language models), RAG (retrieval-augmented generation), blah, blah, blah, tell them to go home,” he said. “Ask them if they understand your business.”
After the proceedings, Shekhar offered his insights into how the workshop turned out. He said the energy and intellectual exchange at the event were truly remarkable.
“We can only benefit through this intellectual exchange between academia and the industry,” he said. “More than 130 organizations were represented at the event, which tells us how important an event like this is for one and all. This wasn’t just about theoretical discussions; it was about tackling real-world challenges and forging partnerships that will drive innovation. The Jindal School has a vital role as a hub for this rapidly evolving sector. We have a major task at hand to take the momentum from this event and translate it into action. Let’s continue these conversations, build upon the connections we’ve made, and work together to shape the future of fintech.”
