How AI is reshap­ing fin­ance

New Straits Times

THE future of bank­ing no longer sits behind glass coun­ters or within phys­ical branches. It now lives in code, and increas­ingly, in the palm of your hand.

Enter gen­er­at­ive arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence (AI).

“In the past, risk was assessed using rigid logic, simple if-this-then-that rules,” said Microlink’s chief tech­no­logy officer, Hong Wye Kean.

“But with gen­er­at­ive AI, we’re talk­ing about mod­els that can under­stand, reason and act with con­text. That’s a game-changer,” he said at the “Future­Bank 2025” event recently.

Microlink show­cased an AI-enabled digital on board­ing pro­cess, com­pleted in under five minutes. The sys­tem auto­mat­ic­ally scanned more than 90 data points while run­ning facial veri­fic­a­tion, doc­u­ment authen­tic­a­tion and device fin­ger­print­ing.

And if a flagged phone or laptop was used, say, one linked to pre­vi­ous fraud cases, the sys­tem blocked access even before the user could begin veri­fic­a­tion.

“It’s not just about whether the per­son looks right,” said Wye Kean. “The sys­tem checks whether the device itself has been com­prom­ised.”

Usage of mod­u­lar sys­tem archi­tec­ture, built on Java and .NET, allows for 24/7 uptime with 99.96 per cent avail­ab­il­ity.

Banks need not replace entire leg­acy sys­tems; they can adopt new fea­tures incre­ment­ally, allow- ing for a more seam­less mod- ern­isa­tion jour­ney.

“Pre­vi­ously, we’d need to hire domain experts, retrain them and scale slowly. Now, with AI, we train the model once and deploy it across hun­dreds of agents,” said Wye Kean.

“Effect­ively, your smart­phone becomes a fully oper­a­tional bank branch.”

PREVENTING THREATS

Microlink exec­ut­ive dir­ector Kwang Chwen Wong said the focus has now shif­ted from react­ing to fin­an­cial threats to pre­vent­ing them before they mater­i­al­ise.

“What mat­ters today is what hap­pens before and dur­ing a trans­ac­tion. Tra­di­tional anti-money laun­der­ing (AML) tools detect threats after the fact. With AI, we’re clos­ing that gap by embed­ding intel­li­gence into every layer,” he said.

This includes scan­ning dark web data­bases in real time to verify the legit­im­acy of trans­ac­tion sources, a move that strengthens fraud pre­ven­tion sig­ni­fic­antly.

For a broader per­spect­ive, RHB Bank­ing Group head of trans­form­a­tion

Archit Anand said the bank­ing sec­tor’s trans­form­a­tion has evolved well bey­ond cus­tomer exper­i­ence.

“First, it was about product mod­ern­isa­tion. Then we spoke of eco­sys­tem mod­ern­isa­tion. Today, it’s about infra­struc­ture trans­form­a­tion,” he said.

“Mod­u­lar, flex­ible archi­tec­ture is cru­cial. It’s not about tear­ing everything

down, it’s about build­ing on what you already have.”

But he said that the real chal­lenge lies in mind­set, not machines.

“The obstacle isn’t the tech­no­logy. It’s about rethink­ing trans­form­a­tion. Banks must stop think­ing like banks and start think­ing like tech­no­logy firms.”