American Express: Say Hello to the Future
American Express has long been regarded as one of the most innovative and well-respected companies in the world. From 1961, when American Express purchased its first computer, to when it implemented online banking, it has embraced cutting-edge technology.
American Express has been a leader in using artificial intelligence and cognitive technologies for years. Despite the hype surrounding artificial intelligence right now, American Express began using it more than ten years ago. As a global financial services institution with a loyal customer base, keeping their accounts safe and secure has always been a top priority. In addition, Amex offered superior fraud protection and a variety of luxurious membership rewards, it became the preferred credit card provider.
American Express, however, has struggled to maintain its brand status and profits margins as fintech and digital sophistication have grown. As the COVID-19 crisis continues to impact the travel and leisure sector, American Express’s revenues have fallen short of expectations. In hopes of turning the tide, Amex is looking into artificial intelligence (AI) as a means to optimize what it does best: guarantee secure transactions and deliver exceptional customer service.
There are three ways in which American Express is using AI to stay ahead of disruption:
- Machine Learning Fraud Detection: American Express is now implementing deep-learning-based models optimized with NVIDIA TensorRT and running on NVIDIA Triton Inference Server to better identify and minimize the occurrence of credit card fraud. These technologies can discover and highlight irregularities in tens of millions of daily transactions in real-time using recurrent neural networks (RNNs) supplemented with long short-term memory networks (LSTMs). Among the major credit card companies, Amex has maintained the lowest fraud rates in the credit card industry (half that of its competitors).
- Accelerating Commercial Credit: To speed up the commercial credit onboarding process, American Express used AI and machine learning (ML)to automate the document analysis process, allowing the underwriter to focus on dealing with the customer.
3. Create Exceptional Customer Experience: Later this year, Amex will be releasing its new app-based, contextual, and predictive search capability. Trained on a natural language processing (NLP) model initially designed for the company’s customer service chatbots, the feature will “understand” various scenarios and, if all goes right, predict what customers need before they type anything at all. For example, if a person opens the app at the airport, the tool will surmise that the person is trying to find the lounge. Alternatively, if a person opens the app after seeing suspicious charges, the tool will ask if they contest the charge right away.
In conclusion, American Express was an early adopter and is well ahead of the curve in extracting value from AI. The company is already at the peak of its productivity, meaning 100% of its models are powered by AI, and it works throughout the customer life cycle, starting with new account creation, limit assignment, customer management, and fraud detection.
