Using AI as a catalyst for financial transformation

At a glance

Industry: Banking and capital markets
Today's issue: Transformation
Outcomes: Data-driven strategic decisions, operational efficiency, future-ready AI infrastructure, improved financial disclosures

Introduction

Our client, a large Canadian bank, was facing significant operational hurdles that impeded its ability to fully leverage artificial intelligence (AI) for financial transformation. Addressing these hurdles would help protect the bank from market fluctuations and competitive disruptions. It would also enhance operational efficiency to strengthen the company’s strategic position in a quickly evolving market landscape.

Our relationship with Amazon Web Services (AWS) helped us accelerate and streamline the bank’s data transformation journey and enable them to get the most value from their AWS solutions and tools.

Challenge

The primary challenge the bank’s investor relations team faced was labour-intensive processes for preparing financial reports, which consumed valuable resources. The bank lacked an efficient competitive analysis solution, leaving it vulnerable to market fluctuations and competitive threats. In addition, the bank’s data science team faced a nine-month timeline to transition AI models from development to production, and this added substantial costs annually.

These challenges underscored the need for a strategic overhaul to enhance operational agility, optimize resource allocation and secure a competitive edge in the quickly evolving financial landscape.

Approach

In 2024, the bank chose PwC Canada to begin their transformative journey with AWS. In collaboration with the bank and AWS, we embarked on a multi-stream roadmap to build an insights-driven machine learning operations (MLOps) platform to drive automated insights and several AI-enabled solutions for competitor analysis, financial performance and external research augmentation.

Through implementing several transformative solutions, we were able to help the bank achieve long-term value creation, including substantial return on investment on AI-enabled solutions.

Key strategic outcomes include the following:

The implementation of an AI-powered research chatbot significantly accelerates decision making and market responsiveness by providing instant and reliable insights. This solution enables the bank to make quick, data-driven strategic decisions in a dynamic market environment.

The bank has gained a competitive edge through advanced analytics, as AI-driven competitive analysis now delivers real-time market intelligence. This enables the bank to proactively formulate and execute strategies.

Impact

Our work with this bank addressed critical business challenges and delivered substantial value across multiple fronts. Overall, they achieved faster market responses, optimized resource allocation, enhanced strategic planning and improved stakeholder confidence.

The bank is now leveraging cutting-edge AI technologies to transform their financial operations and strategic capabilities, positioning their organization as a leader in the data-driven financial sector.