Gartner, Inc. has announced the winners of the 2020 Gartner Eye on Innovation Award for financial services in the Americas. The award recognizes innovative use of digital technology-enabled capabilities, products or services to highlight “best-in-class” financial industry initiatives launched within the past 12 months and to offer insight about developments in digital innovation.
The finalists presented their case studies during a special virtual event. BNY Mellon was selected as the regional 2020 Gartner Eye on Innovation Award Americas winner by a poll of industry peers. Marsh & McLennan and TIAA were also named as winners.
Regional Winner:
BNY Mellon — The ability to accurately predict future cash and liquidity is critical for banks and their clients as it results in efficient use of capital, reduced financing costs and lower risk. Yet the complexity of cash forecasting is a challenge for many treasury teams. The BNY Mellon Machine Learning Model for Liquidity Forecasting provides a prediction of end-of-day liquidity balance with sufficient lead time by deploying several machine learning (ML) and statistical models to learn liquidity flow patterns at hourly levels. External factors such as interest rates, equity market indices and bond market spreads are also fed into the predictive models. With this solution, the treasury team can make timely decisions about sourcing or deploying liquidity according to the anticipated end-of-day balance, freeing up to $1.5 billion in excess cash buffers.
Additional Award Recipients:
Marsh & McLennan — Marsh & McLennan identified a need for marine insurance to respond to technological disruptions in the industry, as it is one of the oldest forms of insurance. The company entered an exclusive partnership with InsurTech to develop a digital solution for marine insurance that enables collaboration between the broker, clients and insurers. The digital ecosystem, called Quest, leverages ML and behavioral analytics on real-time vessel movement and historical claims to identify and reduce the risks that cost the industry over $1 billion. The solution collated data from more than 7,500 documents for over 270 clients, leading to a 2% increase in client retention and a 5% increase in new business.
TIAA — TIAA was created to ensure those working in the non-profit, government, higher education, and health care fields could retire with dignity. To help the firm better support its 15,000 institutional clients, TIAA developed Institutional Client Onboarding Next-generation (ICON). A major portion of TIAA’s Defined Contribution Retirement Solutions for calculating benefits are outsourced services, which consist of more than 600 features that yield over one trillion possible client configurations. TIAA reduced the complexity of these configurations and increased implementation accuracy when onboarding new institutional clients with ICON, an intelligent system with a simplified automated process for determining participant contributions and company matches. ICON has resulted in reduced client requirement capture time from 40 hours to two hours, the elimination of two to three weeks of manual translation per client, and a $3 million annual reduction in operating expenses.
Finalists:
AXA — The current way that the insurance industry designs and instantiates products requires manual implementation of product attributes into each IT component of the insurance lifecycle. With Computable Contracts, AXA aims to increase the efficiency of claim operations and enable AXA operating companies to create itemized insurance at scale. By becoming computable, the insurance product can be considered as a collection of standardized micro-coverages assembled into a contract for a specific need, each of which has its own attributes and logic. This new architectural design will drive growth opportunities and generate substantial cost reductions by enabling continuous improvement of product portfolio and process across the insurance product lifecycle, while also limiting dependency on IT components when new or updated insurance products are deployed.
Bank of Montreal —The Bank of Montreal AI Cashflow Prediction is designed to deliver contextual, personalized insights to help customers manage expenses and achieve better financial health. The AI Cashflow Prediction uses artificial intelligence (AI) and ML to analyze historical transactions and balances, establishing patterns that can predict a customer’s future cash shortfalls up to seven days in advance. Customers are notified with the expected timing and amount of the shortfall, the possible transactions causing the issue and a recommendation to address the gap. The model was piloted on data from two million accounts and achieved 97% accuracy, 95% precision and 68% recall, with customers rating the service an average of 4.5 out of 5 stars.
Evolve Bank & Trust and Branch —Evolve Bank & Trust teamed up with mobile app Branch to create a product that blends Branch’s digital wallet with Evolve’s FDIC-insured checking accounts and Mastercard debit card to provide users with early access to money already earned but not yet received, with no fees or interest. Employers offer Branch as a free financial wellness benefit and banking alternative to reduce the costs of paper checks and paycards. Branch users have seen a 20% reduction in overdraft fees, and in a survey among employees at one company implementing Branch, 94% felt they were better able to pay bills on time.
Mastercard — As consumers continue to change how they shop, pay and connect, these connections bring more points of vulnerability. Mastercard developed Connected Intelligence (CI) to solve fraud beyond the transaction, detecting it at every interaction point in the consumer journey. A coordinated set of AI-based solutions act within milliseconds, detecting fraud and facilitating intelligent security decisions for millions of customers. On average, customers integrating CI have increased fraud detection by 50% while reducing false positives by the same rate, helping to increase approval rates for some issuers by 10% on card not present transactions.
Morgan Stanley — Morgan Stanley developed Morgan Stanley Impact Quotient® (MS IQ), a patent-pending portfolio analysis and reporting application that empowers clients to align their investment portfolios with their unique impact goals, such a climate change and gender equality. MS IQ provides a proprietary taxonomy of over 100 environmental and social impact objectives from which to identify a client's unique preferences; a quantitative methodology to assess a client's investments; and a seamless end-to-end experience, all integrated into existing Morgan Stanley applications. Since its launch, the solution has both benefited existing wealth management clients and helped to drive new business for the firm.
Travelers — When shopping for a quote on a home insurance policy, many homeowners are confused by the question asking about the shape of the roof of their house. Yet, roof shape is an important risk factor for insurers to consider, as certain roof shapes are more susceptible to damage from high winds, tornadoes and hurricanes. To solve this problem, the Travelers technology team introduced the AI Roof Shape Model. By using a combination of AI-driven analytics and aerial imagery to deliver highly accurate information about roof shapes, this new system delivers faster policy pricing recommendations to agents and brokers. The detailed evaluation of a house’s roof shape provided by this model will improve underwriting accuracy in assessing risk, which could bring up to a $5 million in annual savings.
The identification of a Gartner award winner or finalist is not an endorsement by Gartner of any company, vendor, product or service.