Newgen Launches Gen AI Platform For Banks

Newgen Software Inc. has launched a generative artificial intelligence platform called LumYn, designed primarily to help decision makers within banks. The platform will help financial institutions "enhance profitability and significantly improve customer experiences", the company said.

"LumYn can answer loaded questions like how to increase your cards business," said Newgen's Head of AI Practice Rajan Nagina. "The platform then looks through your customer data, analyses it and gives you an answer in a conversational manner."

When it comes to privacy concerns, the company said that it only provides the platform, and that data for analysis comes from banks, which are obligated by regulation to store customer information locally.

Newgen's platform is built on datasets and behavioural patterns that would be roughly common across all retail banks. When a bank buys LumYn, the platform then goes through its data, finetunes it, and is ready to provide answers which can be used to make decisions.

The platform is designed for the executive level leadership at a bank, that is, senior management positions, like a head of retail banking or the person leading the credit card department, to gain insights into the kind of products and services customers use often. They can then leverage that information to "deepen customer engagement and drive business growth", according to Newgen.

An increasing issue plaguing AI, has been hallucinations, that is, technology providing biased, or outright incorrect information. Newgen says LumYn doesn't have that problem.

Nagina breaks it down into three layers, reliability, security and trust. "People are going to be using it for decision making. We've built LumYn to provide answers till where it is confident, after which point it gives up. It has a boundary condition."

When it comes to reliability and trust, the company claims that the platform doesn't just give you answers based on generic queries but rather, uses bank data. "LumYn comes back with answers that your data holds," said Nagina.

While the platform may be looking at a bank's data, the way a question is asked might imply a bias or influence LumYn to provide a certain answer.

It wouldn't be too surprising, given that the data AI is trained on ultimately does come from real world, lived human interactions and behaviours. Ultimately, bias in any AI platform, can reduce the technology's potential and trust factor.

"People could still use bias in their questions to gather data and then populate that as a model. We want to expose underlying layers; the decision variables," said Virender Jeet, chief executive officer of Newgen.

There has to be a bias management system in place, pre-configured for products and businesses. "Right now its not there because we don't know what shape the product is going to take," said Jeet.

With the fast adoption of AI, c-suite level decision makers are more prone to giving the burgeoning technology a chance. This is compounded by the fact that they see operational efficiency and faster decision making as one of the key benefits.

A 2023 report from Workday shows that 98% of CEOs say their business would see immediate benefits from AI and machine learning adoption. Similarly, 56% say that operational efficiency is main driver for AI and machine learning investment and adoption.

Newgen claims that LumYn will do just that, by making it easier and faster for senior executives to come to clear, defined outcomes that can be implemented. But will it be possible for their software to replace the c-suite entirely?

"Never...It's a thought experiment in a sense, it's not taking any decisions. It allows the users to make better decisions," Nagina said.