Banking Sector Accelerates AI Service Development... Strengthening Industry-Academic Collaboration

[Asia Economy Reporter Song Hwajeong] Banks are accelerating the introduction of services utilizing artificial intelligence (AI). To this end, they are strengthening cooperation with academia.

According to the financial sector on the 7th, Woori Bank recently signed a business agreement with Yonsei University for AI research and development.

Yonsei University has a faculty composed of excellent researchers who have held top-level conferences and published numerous papers in the AI field, leading the world in artificial intelligence technology beyond Korea. In particular, it is the first major domestic university to establish the 'College of AI Convergence' and is striving to nurture AI specialists and convergence talents.

Through this business agreement, the two institutions will jointly research AI algorithms for applying the latest AI technology to the financial industry and discover research tasks to apply them to business models. They also plan to develop various sustainable collaboration models.

The main contents of this agreement include ▲ advancement of AI-based Knowledge Management System (KMS) ▲ Optical Character Recognition (OCR) structure recognition ▲ Explainable AI (XAI) ▲ efficiency improvement of AI classification problems. The plan is to maximize industry-academia synergy through research and development to apply related latest technologies to financial business.

This agreement is expected to be an opportunity for mutual growth by realizing innovative ideas for data utilization based on the latest technology by Woori Bank and by Yonsei University utilizing financial data that has been difficult to use for research and development. Woori Bank plans to expand data assetization to service utilization areas based on the latest AI technology this year and use it as a foundation for building an AI banker in the future.

IBK Industrial Bank of Korea has partnered with KAIST to introduce explainable artificial intelligence (eXplainable AI, XAI) technology by interpreting AI technology and developed a package to easily apply it to various financial services.

Existing AI technology had difficulty explaining the reasons for the results due to complex processing. This was evaluated as lacking fairness and reliability in fields requiring explanations such as finance and healthcare. Since August last year, IBK has conducted joint research on XAI technology in cooperation with the KAIST Explainable AI Research Center for about eight months.

The XAI model was developed with a focus on expansion into financial services and has the distinction of being easily applicable. In the future, when banks utilize AI in financial services, it will be possible to provide AI financial services with higher trust by enabling grounds for judgment and accurate explanations.

IBK plans to apply this XAI model to the existing corporate prediction model in operation and provide prediction results and objective explanatory information to the sales field.