Citigroup will teach IBM Watson to banking business

The largest international financial institution of Citigroup signed the agreement with IBM which provides studying of possible scopes of the IBM Watson supercomputer in banking business. The last is called in honor of the inventor Thomas Watson and differs in unique capability to understand the questions asked by normal human language and with a speed inherent to the person (or quicker) to give on them answers.

Citi intends to investigate tools of the deep content analysis and self-training in the long term to transfer to the machine a part of functions on customer interaction. At the moment the number of the accounts registered in bank reaches 200 million in more than 160 countries of the world. Besides, to Watson it is going to assign problems of requirements analysis of investors and processing of huge volumes of economic information in real time. It should help with assessment of financial risks and acceptance of the weighed and justified management decisions.

Citibank services 200 million accounts. To cope with a huge number of customer information, the company decided to teach the IBM Watson supercomputer to banking

Thereby Citigroup expects to take the next step in the direction of implementation of the concept of creation of the leading digital bank. At the moment all modern means of interactive interaction, including telephone communication, a chat, a web, intelligent ATMs and, of course, employees at offices are available to clients. According to Don Callahan (Don Callahan) holding posts of the administrative, operating and technical director of Citi, in the future the usual model of interaction of investors with the accounts can undergo changes. What – depends on project deliverables with IBM Watson participation.

This year Citigroup celebrates the 200 anniversary of the activity, and the financial institution passed a considerable part of this long way together with IBM. The companies managed to make the first really significant break in 1954 when a system with the symbolical name "artificial intelligence" allowed to reduce time expenditure by the solution of a problem of search of optimal balance between costs and profitability to only 9.5 minutes. It was necessary to spend not less than 1000 man-hours for it earlier.