SouthState Bank, a financial institution based in Winter Haven, Florida, is embracing Microsoft’s Bard, a competitor to Open AI’s ChatGPT. Despite other banks restricting the use of ChatGPT, SouthState Bank sees Bard as a game changer and believes it’s worth the hype. According to Chris Nichols, the director of capital markets, the system is reliable at summarizing, knowledge linking, and text assimilation. SouthState Bank uses it to help their employees summarize their discussion threads and minutes from meetings and compose emails for them. It is also utilized to summarize regulatory documents, policies, and help the marketing team create copy.
Banks are becoming more interested in generative AI technology, noted Michael Haney, the head of digital core at Galileo Financial Technologies, and most banks are looking for ways to optimize it. SouthState Bank is one of these institutions adopting this type of technology to enhance their business processes. Nichols believes that ChatGPT and Bard are great tools for giving insights and summarizing massive data sets that can be more consumable for humans, making them more productive. The bank also trains the system using its own data and policy documents, and they do not feed any of their customers’ data to the system.
Nichols acknowledged that the system has limitations, such as not being capable of predictive analytics and sometimes hallucinating, or making up answers, if given incorrect information. The system requires human oversight to correct this issue. However, the efficiency and productivity gains that the bank observed led them to create a risk governance committee focusing on generative AI. The Committee aims to teach people to ask better questions and structure documents with descriptive headings to help improve the results.
Overall, Nichols sees large language models to be the primary way that people will interact with platforms in the future. They have the potential to change how services are delivered across the banking industry using natural language questions. For 2000 of its 5000 employees, SouthState Bank’s Bard has brought a five to eight times boost in productivity. Costs to employ Bard are minimal — $50k to produce it and $30k monthly for testing and running it — making it an excellent investment for the bank.
