About 75 per cent of business leaders agree that their competitive advantage is dependent on making the best use of AI and analysing alternative data sources emerged as the top GenAI use case, Experian’s latest research report stated which investigates different perspectives from senior decision-makers in four key areas: strategic priorities, data and analytics, technology, and risk.
Conducted by Forrester Consulting, the research surveyed 1320 Financial Services and Telco C-suite and Director level leaders across ten countries in the EMEA and APAC regions, including India, Australia, Denmark, Germany, Italy, New Zealand, Norway, South Africa, Spain, and the Netherlands.
The report revealed how business leaders are utilising Generative AI (GenAI), consolidating datasets to improve decisioning models, and focusing on customer experience to better prepare for a future shaped by challenging economic conditions, technological disruption, and evolving customer expectations.
Business leaders identified technological disruption as the top external factor impacting their business in the coming two years, emphasising the race toward AI supremacy to improve business efficiencies and reduce costs. 75 per cent of surveyed participants believe that competitive advantage in their industry will be dependent on who can make the best use of AI and three-quarters 75 per cent of the surveyed technology leaders are exploring GenAI use cases to implement them within the next year.
It added that about 75 per cent of senior leaders agree that GenAI will significantly improve the way they assess risk. Analysing alternative data sources using GenAI emerged as the top use case 78%, highlighting its ability to unlock valuable insights from non-traditional datasets, supporting the creation of better decisioning models and a more holistic picture of the customer.
Technological Disruption
Access to a centralised cloud-based platform for data, analytics and software was identified by survey respondents as a notable factor to improve risk strategy. Nearly half 41 per cent of respondents agree that over the next 12 months, they will see additional credit stress with more missed repayments and delinquencies – with that same percentage 42 per cent tightening their lending criteria in the past year.
According to the report, 50 per cent of risk leaders also indicated that the top risk priority is to improve the ability to identify financially vulnerable customers. Better integration between data sources, model development tools, ops deployment and decisioning software – coupled with harnessing the power of AI – allows lenders to have a more holistic view of borrowers and to fast-track the data-to-insight-to-action process.
The report mentioned that data and analytics leaders are prioritising the move of siloed datasets into a single platform that combines data and analytics, as this better enables AI/ML capability and allows them to push models into production in weeks instead of months.
In the current state, more than three-quarters 76 per cent of respondents believe that it takes them too long to develop and deploy AI/ML models, with 63 per cent stating that they are updating their models more frequently than ever before to adapt to changing consumer credit behaviour.
"This year’s research highlights the importance of two critical factors – first the race for AI superiority, with business leaders believing it to be critical to gain competitive advantage in their sector. Secondly, the a clear focus on investment in analytics tools and infrastructure to better harness the power of data, with many businesses still struggling with the time and effort required to develop and deploy models. The findings suggest businesses are increasingly adopting cloud-based services to better connect data, analytics and software,” stated Manish Jain, Country Managing Director, Experian India.
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