Emirates NBD’s digital bank Liv. launches chatbot powered by Kasisto’s KAI Banking
Kasisto, creators of KAI Banking, the leading conversational AI platform for finance, and Liv., the largest digital bank in the UAE, operated and managed by Emirates NBD, a leading bank in the Middle East region, announced the launch of Olivia, Liv.’s conversational
Launched in 2017, Liv. is a mobile-only bank for UAE millennials centered around lifestyle, offering instant fully digital account opening, curated and personalized content, social media based money transfers, customizable goal based savings accounts and gamification to offer a differentiated experience for young customers. Built also by a team of millennials, Liv. is today the fastest growing bank in the UAE, acquiring more customers monthly than any other bank and adjudged the Best Digital Bank in the Middle East 2018 by Asian Banker.
“Liv.’s goal of providing a differentiated and digital experience for a new generation of customers, empowering them in their daily lives, learning and adapting to their individual preferences, and providing a banking platform that is intuitive and simple to use matches perfectly with Kasisto’s vision to enable customers to make better financial decisions through human-like conversational AI,” said Zor Gorelov, CEO and Co-Founder of Kasisto. “We’re thrilled that Liv. chose KAI, Kasisto’s state-of-the-art Conversational AI platform to create Olivia and power its conversational capabilities, as they progress in their journey to create a unique and innovative new bank.”
“With Liv., our goal is to create entirely new consumer experiences that are as natural and easy as a conversation and woven into everyday life. KAI’s agile AI platform with built-in banking expertise meant that we could quickly ‘train’ Olivia and customize her to reflect the bank’s brand and voice,” said Jayesh Patel, Head of Liv. “In its role as a financial buddy, Liv. helps customers better manage their finances, and we’re very excited that they now have Olivia to further that experience.”
“Pushed by scorned crypto fanatics grasping for some justification of their obsession in the wake of the bitcoin collapse.”
If you’re a distributed ledger or blockchain true believer, take a deep breath. And maybe sit down. This won’t be comfortable. Or boring.
One of Australia’s Big Four banks, ANZ, says it’s run ruler over the supposedly transformative technology and, to put it mildly, it’s neither impressed or convinced of the promise of a revolution in trusted transactions is just around the corner.
“Blockchain has been the darling of the tech world for some time and increasingly so over the medium term, perhaps in part pushed by scorned crypto fanatics grasping for some justification of their obsession in the wake of the bitcoin collapse,” argues Maria Bellmas, ANZ Institutional’s associate director, trade and supply chain product.
“Sold as a solution to all of life’s problems, blockchain offers a ton of legitimate solutions for businesses – but raises just as many questions,” Bellmas continues, before delivering one the most compelling reality checks on tech vendor spin and call outs on solutions desperate for a problem.
The crux of Bellmas’ argument – and the ANZ notes it’s her individual view, even though it made it public – is that while blockchain has real and demonstrable benefits in specific situation many projects or problems “do not necessarily need it and are better off using existing good old databases and technology solutions.”
So, with blockchain vendor hype at an all time high, especially in the financial services sector, ANZ have let loose a big corporate blockchain debunker that navigates, in plain English and good humour, when a daggy old database might do the job just as well as a distributed ledger.
It’s certainly worth a potted tour.
Call it how you see it …
“The reality is a lot of the problems blockchain projects attempt to fix have already been solved by existing technologies,” Bellmas argues, adding that “in many cases, a regular database can solve for the problem with more reliability and for much less cost than blockchain.”
A regular database? Like the one the DBA reckons does that stuff already? These ANZ types really are party poopers, despite their profession of belief in Agile. Someone’s always gotta take a pin to the balloon.
Take this sublime embodiment of negative thinking.
“Blockchain has only been available in recent times and its scalability is yet to be proven. Some databases offered by leading technology providers have been in the market for years and have a proven record of processing millions of transactions per day without failure,” Bellmas says.
“Companies therefore need to do a thorough exercise to analyse the problem they are trying to fix and assess if blockchain really is the technology that best fits the solution.”
Next she’ll be saying it burns to much power and is computationally inefficient.
When it works …
Of course, ANZ isn’t saying that blockchain is a complete dud, it’s just that its uses might be more specialised than general. And, when there are specialised needs a special technology can crack that nut.
“Don’t peg us as philistines; blockchain is a technology with a huge number of benefits and it is particularly proving useful in the trade finance space,” says Bellmas.
“ANZ is one of seven banks participating in the eTradeConnect in Hong Kong, an innovative project led by the Hong Kong Monetary Authority which makes use of blockchain technology.”
She adds that ANZ Banking Services Domain Lead, Nigel Dobson has stated that eTradeConnect is “an endorsement not only of the technology but also a broad digitisation strategy within the trade finance world, which is overdue.”
Even so, that’s counterbalanced with this observation.
“The truth is blockchain is not the solution for every project that needs a database. A 2018 study out of China showed despite the plethora of blockchain-related projects entering the market, 92 per cent failed – and did so in an average of just over a year.”
Positive non-use cases
Bellmas also points to the example “of a global project not using blockchain is the recently announced Trade Information Network (TIN), a transformational trade information exchange hub based on open architecture that acts as a trusted registry of purchase order and invoice flows across the end-to-end supply chain."
She argues the TIN, which ANZ has a stake in “tries to solve the lack-of-standardisation problem currently in global trade finance.”
“It has the potential to be the first inclusive global multi-bank, multi-corporate network in trade finance, aiming to achieve a utility much as SWIFT does with payments.”
Not led by the nose
It looks like a matter of horses for courses for ANZ, despite its happy clapping on all things agile.
One thing’s for sure: banks are starting to call the tune to vendors rather than the other way around. That may not be a bad thing either,
Here’s the NIST flowchart ANZ referenced as a course of blockchain decisioning:
I used to blog about blockchain and distributed ledger technology (DLT) almost once a week … four years ago. Today, I hardly blog about it at all. I guess it just shows what’s top of mind and what’s not at any time in FinTech and, right now, blockchain is not top of mind. In fact, most of the conferences I go to these days it’s a surprise if anyone is talking about blockchain or DLT at all. It’s a no-no.
How can a rising technology that everyone loved fall so fast? Is DLT dead? Where do we go from here?
Just two years ago, The Wall Street Journal called blockchain a foundational technology as important as electricity and the worldwide web. But here is the most important part of that article:
Blockchain is not a disruptive technology, whose impact, once in the marketplace, is often quite rapid. Blockchain is a foundational technology, like electricity and the internet, whose transformational impact takes much longer – decades rather than years.
It is not a disruptive technology. It will not change things overnight. It takes a long time.
That’s because blockchain and DLT need to get agreement about how to use them before they can work and its use cases involve areas that have the most complex structures, and therefore the most complex agreements. Digital identity involves agreements between governments, corporations, financial institutions and citizens before it can be applied. Similarly, another major use case – clearing and settlement – needs agreements between financial institutions, clearing authorities, cross-border infrastructures, government authorities and central banks before it can be applied.
In fact, if you look at any of the major areas blockchain can make a difference, it involves complex discussions around structural change before it can work. That’s why it takes a long time, and doesn’t happen overnight.
This is why many commentators are now writing negative news about blockchain and DLT which, btw, are not the same. A distributed ledger can work without a blockchain, as demonstrated by Corda from R3 – a blockchain-inspired open source distributed ledger platform.
Furthermore, blockchain and DLT is incredibly complex from both a technological, business and use case viewpoint. Not only does it require in-depth understanding of how databases work and how the network applies consensus to the database through permissioned and non-permissioned structures; but it also requires an in-depth understanding of how to use that database technology in a specific use case that is also complex, such as the clearing of complex derivatives in closed markets. Add onto this that it then requires the authorities, who probably understand the use case and not the technology, to agree how and when to implement such technology for that use case and you can see why it’s such a hazardous playground.
And I immediately clicked, thinking is this the death-knell for DLT?
Answer no, and the article is a bit of a non-headline to be honest.
The article quotes heavily from Maria Bellmas, Associate Director, Trade and Supply Chain Product for ANZ, who said a number of things:
“Blockchain has been the darling of the tech world for some time and increasingly so over the medium term, perhaps in part pushed by scorned crypto fanatics grasping for some justification of their obsession in the wake of the bitcoin collapse … sold as a solution to all of life’s problems, blockchain offers a ton of legitimate solutions for businesses – but raises just as many questions … the reality is a lot of the problems blockchain projects attempt to fix have already been solved by existing technologies. In many cases, a regular database can solve for the problem with more reliability and for much less cost than blockchain …
“Blockchain has only been available in recent times and its scalability is yet to be proven. Some databases offered by leading technology providers have been in the market for years and have a proven record of processing millions of transactions per day without failure. Companies therefore need to do a thorough exercise to analyse the problem they are trying to fix and assess if blockchain really is the technology that best fits the solution …
“Don’t peg us as philistines; blockchain is a technology with a huge number of benefits and it is particularly proving useful in the trade finance space. ANZ is one of seven banks participating in the eTradeConnect in Hong Kong, an innovative project led by the Hong Kong Monetary Authority which makes use of blockchain technology.”
She adds that ANZ Banking Services Domain Lead, Nigel Dobson has stated that eTradeConnect is “an endorsement not only of the technology but also a broad digitisation strategy within the trade finance world, which is overdue … the truth is blockchain is not the solution for every project that needs a database. A 2018 study out of China showed despite the plethora of blockchain-related projects entering the market, 92 per cent failed – and did so in an average of just over a year.”
In other words, she’s calling it as it is. If you need a blockchain, it is for a very specific need. That need is to share a database of records with people you do not trust. The records need access and updating by everyone, and yet you do not trust any of them and so the network manages that trust. Sweet and simple. If you do not need to share a database or if you trust the people accessing the database, you do not need a blockchain. We’ve known this for a long time.
We all got hugely excited about Apple launching a credit card with Goldman Sachs and Mastercard last week. Whoopy-doo!
This was a major lift for Mastercard in particular. As Wedbush’s Moshe Katri noted payments on the card will be processed by Mastercard using “Mastercard’s token and M-chip technology, which allow the card to be stored on a digital device without exposing any of its data.”
Katri thinks that the implications for payments and fintech from the announcement are a modest boost to Mastercard and a modest negative for Visa, given that Mastercard will process payments on the card. As a result, Mastercard’s stock rose last week.
What can Visa do?
Well, I just got a press release from Alipay announcing their strategic tie-up with Visa. This is probably even more exciting as it is the integration of two infrastructures from West and East to create a global interoperable structure.
Here’s the opening of the Press Release:
ALIPAY AND VISA ANNOUNCE STRATEGIC QR CODE PARTNERSHIP
MARCH 31, 2019, EMBARGOED UNTIL 23:59, HUANGZHOU, CHINA
Further to Alipay’s expansion into enabling QR codes across the world, we are delighted today to announce a strategic partnership with Visa Inc. to enable QR code usage for both Alipay mobile users and Visa cardholders. The aim is to allow American, European and other non-Chinese tourists to use and pay with their card in China in the same way as Chinese tourists can use the Alipay mobile app abroad. It also reinforces the use of QR codes as a standard for payments, which is becoming more and more pervasive in all economies.
I’ve seen this coming for some time and did note that Visa launched QR code payments in India last year to appeal to PayTM users, bearing in mind that PayTM is powered by Ant Financial’s Alipay technologies.
What is more interesting for me however is the tie-up between American and Chinese global players. This is something that I had imagined the US Department of Justice or Senate would have blocked, as they did with the Ant Financial acquisition of Worldpay, but there is a clear note in the press release that all payments data for Visa users is held by Visa and does not cross the Alipay network.
That may be the case, but I wonder if Donald Trump’s administration will be as relaxed about that as Visa seems to be. Something that I would suggest is worth watching but, if this is successful and rolls out worldwide, it could be a game-changer as it critically moves us away from card networks to code networks for payments.
Businesses are running their photo, video, and file cloud storage applications in AWS to lower costs, improve time-to-market and easily scale their storage. AWS’s object storage service, Amazon S3, stores hundreds of billions of objects, and it is built to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. Amazon S3 is designed to provide 99.999999999% durability and 99.99% availability over a given year for your cloud storage needs. Amazon S3 offers low, pay-as-you-go pricing, so businesses only pay for the storage they use. Plus, getting started with AWS is fast. You can sign-up and start storing your files in a matter of minutes.
Amazon Web Services offers cloud web hosting solutions that provide businesses, non-profits, and governmental organizations with low-cost ways to deliver their websites and web applications. Whether you’re looking for a marketing, rich-media, or ecommerce website, AWS offers a wide-range of website hosting options, and we’ll help you select the one that is right for you.
With AWS, you can use whatever CMS you like, including WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, and more. AWS also supports and provides SDKs for popular platforms like Java, Ruby, PHP, Node.js, and .Net.
Datacenters worldwide
Your customers can be anywhere in the world. With AWS you can have a datacenter or CDN hosting your website in any geography you choose with just a few mouse clicks.
Scalable from day one
Website traffic can fluctuate a lot. From quiet times in the middle of the night, to campaign driven, social media sharing traffic spikes, AWS infrastructure that can grow and shrink to meet your needs.
Flexible pricing models
AWS only charges you for the resources you use, with no up-front costs or long-term contracts. AWS has web hosting options that offer pay-as-you-go pricing or fixed monthly pricing.
Web and mobile refers to the collection of tools and technologies required to power internet applications. AWS provides on-demand access to scalable web and application servers, storage, databases, content delivery, cache, search, and other application services that make it easier to build and run apps that deliver a great customer experience.
With our comprehensive set of on-demand compute, storage, database, and application services, you can easily deploy and maintain apps that always run fast.
AWS is a language and operating system agnostic platform. You choose the development platform or programming model that makes the most sense for your business.
Different parts of your app require different compute, memory, and networking configurations. AWS offers 32 instance types with different amounts of compute, memory, I/O performance, graphics hardware so you can choose the ones that work best for your app. AWS offers both Linux and Windows instances and gives you root access to each one.
Automated scaling makes it easier to administer applications with variable demand. When traffic increases, our Auto Scaling service will launch additional instances to respond to the demand, and our Elastic Load Balancing service will distribute the increased load across your instances. When demand decreases, Auto Scaling can shutdown idle instances, saving you money.
AWS provides on-demand access to a wide range of cloud infrastructure services, charging you only for the resources you actually use. AWS enables you to eliminate the need for costly hardware and the administrative pain that goes along with owning and operating it. AWS can reduce costs and improve cash flow, whether you are starting out or operating on a large scale.
Amazon RDS is a managed relational database with support for MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, PostgreSQL, and Oracle. Amazon RDS makes it easy to operate and scale a relational database by handling time-consuming database administration tasks.
Amazon CloudFront is a global content delivery network with 51 locations worldwide, so your pages always load fast. Amazon CloudFront is easy to use and supports both static and dynamic content.
With Simple Storage Service (S3), you can add any amount of content and access it from anywhere. Additionally, for static websites you can host directly from S3 with no additional charge.
We are drowning in data that’s supposed to help us. The big data revolution has come from inexpensive data storage and automated data collection, giving organizations exponentially more data than they had in the past. From business logic data like computer log files to detailed weather patterns, purchasing data to TV viewing, we have access to so much data on how the world works and about the lives and habits of individuals.
A lot of this data is just sitting in warehouses, either real or virtual, being ignored or occasionally examined for trends. It’s just too much for people to handle.
When it comes to healthcare, advanced new diagnostic techniques mean that more information is collected about patients than ever before.
Doctors can’t and don’t ignore new information about their patients. Once a diagnostic option is possible and accessible, they then use it to save lives. In the case of CTs and MRIs, for example, these once-rare diagnostic tools used only in the most complicated of cases, are now routine. As CTs and MRIs themselves become more accurate, they now take more images of each person per exam, too. A recent study found that the average CT exam took 82 images of a patient in 1999; by 2010, this number had risen to 679 per patient, a 730 percent increase.
That’s good news for patients, who can get more accurate diagnoses. But it puts a huge strain on radiologists. Thanks to the digitization of medical devices, radiology professionals are having to sift through far more data. The same study revealed that the average radiologist has to interpret one image every three to four seconds in order to keep up with their demanding workload.
One response to this new workload is, of course, to hire more radiologists. But radiologists are doctors, and it takes time to train them with their highly-specialized skills. Even then, there’s a scaling issue. Say we’re capturing 50 times more images than 30 years ago. Clearly, training and hiring 50 times more radiologists isn’t a viable option!
That’s where AI comes in.
What’s AI doing for radiologists? Older AI Computer Aided Diagnosis solutions detected one condition and often required the radiologist to manually send the images for inspection. This made using them a lengthy hassle. Newer solutions are ‘always-on’ and check every image automatically, sometimes for a range of different abnormalities.
It’s not just spewing out diagnoses. Some AI solutions prioritize cases, working out which cases should be seen by a doctor first because they have an urgent condition like an embolism. A patient with cancer probably requires major surgery within weeks, but a patient with an intracranial hemorrhage could have only hours to live unless immediately treated.
AI is not trying to replace radiologists — or other profession that can benefit from big data — with algorithms. Instead, it’s a productivity tool for radiologists, that helps them keep on top of patient care. Radiologists analyze more than 100 studies (each study with hundreds of images) in a long 10-12 hour workday. AI can improve accuracy despite this heavy work burden. A report by Accenture found that AI is redefining healthcare delivery and augmenting human activity.
There is still plenty of work that needs to be done to assess the value of AI in healthcare and to ensure that it reaches its full potential. It isn’t perfect yet and there are still limitations and lacunae. But AI has moved past the “shows promise” stage into “delivering value.” The US Food and Drug Administration has approved a range of new AI-powered solutions for the medical market, and many have EU CE marks too.
The data is going to keep coming. CT and MRI machines will become more accurate and faster, and able to take even more images per person. AI is one of the only ways to help doctors keep up with this deluge of data, allowing them to spend more time working with patients.
AI isn’t going to make business data analysts obsolete; instead, it’s making it possible for them to handle the hundreds of millions of transactions that a company like Amazondeals with. AI isn’t going to put IT operations out of a job; without it, they’ll never really be able to handle the sheer quantity of log data.
A similar trend happened in automobile manufacturing. In 1928, almost half a million people were employed in the US auto industry; today it employs nearly a million people. Robotic automation didn’t cost auto jobs; instead, it made it possible to build more advanced cars.
There’s an irony here. In order to train the deep learning models that make AI accurate and powerful, you need data. Lots of data. It’s big data that makes advanced AI possible in the first place. But equally, in order to take full advantage of the big data revolution, we need the AI revolution.
AI is saving us from big data. Instead of drowning in an endless ocean of data, AI is the lifeboat that lets us navigate it. In some cases, it can help businesses operate better or software applications perform faster. In medicine, it can help doctors use all the data they have to save lives.
The Hi-Media Group is an Internet publisher of twenty proprietary websites serving over 50 million unique visitors every month. The company also provides online advertising and electronic payment solutions to more than 280,000 third-party websites.
The photo blogging platform Fotolog is one of Hi-Media’s most popular websites with over 32 million users worldwide. The site allows users to share photos and comments through free and subscription accounts. The majority of Fotolog’s traffic comes from South America and it is a highly ranked social network in both Chile and Argentina.
In 2011, Hi-media transferred site responsibility to the Paris office where the new IT team had to rebuild the Java-based platform in PHP with a PostgreSQL database. In addition to rebuilding the site, the Paris team also made the decision to move the site from the co-location facility to a new hosting provider.
However, the company was under pressure to identify this new host and complete the migration within a six-month timeframe. Complicating matters was the fact that Fotolog had 32 terabytes (TB) of existing photos, and that rapid growth made predicting future server requirements difficult. Yannig Hervé, CTO of Hi-Media Publishing, says, “We knew we needed a lot of space that we could easily understand how to use—fast.”
With storage and server scalability and time-to-market as top priorities, Hi-Media began weighing its infrastructure options. Because the company had operated another blog platform that used Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) three years earlier, it named AWS as a top contender. Yannig notes, “We already knew how Amazon S3 worked, and we really liked the simplicity and scale, so we were going to put our photos there regardless of where we hosted the site. Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) had the scalability and low-costs we were looking for and when we looked at the free data transfers between Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3, it made Amazon EC2 the obvious choice for the site.”
Within three months, Hi-Media had created a new Fotolog prototype in AWS. Just three months after that, the production site was launched. Amazon S3 provides primary storage, while Amazon EC2 hosts the site’s web servers and PostgreSQL databases. Within Amazon EC2, the site relies on both Elastic Load Balancing for traffic distribution and Amazon EBS for persistent off-instance storage.
Photo descriptions and users’ friends lists are stored in the in-memory cache service Amazon ElastiCache. When users create a new account or receive a comment on a post, Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES) distributes notification emails.
The diagram below shows Fotolog’s current architecture:
The Fotolog platform now features 1 billion photos and 10 billion comments—and counting. Although these figures may sound daunting, Hi-Media no longer worries about over-extending its resources. In fact, the company is looking to migrate other websites to AWS, in addition to expanding its existing environment to include the new NoSQL database service, Amazon DynamoDB.
According to Yannig, the biggest benefit of AWS is that it allows Hi-Media to focus on growth potential and removes “the need to manage storage scale” even when providing content to tens of millions of website visitors. “We have a lot of potential new and existing projects that would benefit from AWS services.”
