セレント・イノベーション＆インサイトデー 2023

2023 marks the 17th year of Celent’s Innovation & Insight events. This is an annual celebration of excellence in technology innovation across the world of financial services, honoring the best-in-class technology for banks, insurers, wealth management, risk professionals, and market infrastructure.

Thank you to all who made Innovation & Insight Day 2023 a success: award nominees and winners (linked below), attendees, presenters, and Celent colleagues.

A quick recap on 2023’s program

If you weren’t able to participate during live sessions or if you’d like to revisit the presentations, you can relive the experience here through on-demand access of the content (registration required), including:

• Replays of the kick-off plenary session, with: a surprise guest in the form of Celent’s newest “analyst” (or is she?); our Chief Research Officer Dan Latimore’s overview of this year’s event and the theme of the “The Emergent Enterprise”; and a conversation between Celent’s Head of Corporate Banking Patricia Hines and Chris DeBrusk, partner at Oliver Wyman, about the evolving FI technology ecosystem, the significance of data, and how to embed innovation within a business.
  
  
• Model Award Program Overviews, including the announcements of winners in Model Bank, Model Buy Side, Model Sell Side, Model Insurer, Model Risk Manager, and Model Wealth Manager awards.
  
  
• Case study videos with award winners.
  
  
• Model award winner in-depth reports (Celent client access only).

The Emergent Enterprise – Accelerating towards a new norm

In the last 30 years of ‘fintech’, many of us would have been greeted at the start of a presentation on disruptive innovation with the superb Hemmingway quote from ‘The Sun Also Rises’:

“How did you go bankrupt?"

“Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.”

This quote is luckily not a prediction and, instead, just a reflection of one fictional character’s experience in the novel. So far at least, the financial services industry is still growing and fulfilling much of the same basic human needs for security – albeit in a much more digital way and with plenty of proposition innovation around the edges.

So, although we’ve not experienced a “suddenly” moment, the industry constantly evolves and today’s financial services ecosystem is quite different from that of 1993. Since the start of fintech, we’ve witnessed a shift away from the traditional boundaries held by Financial Institutions, owing to changes in demographics, buying behaviours, regulation and technology. Financial institutions no longer operate in vacuums and as part of a broad industry-spanning ecosystem instead – especially with concepts such as embedded finance.

Connectivity to others – customers, service providers, and even competitors – has become a critical source of competitive advantage. At the heart of this lies a technology capability - with leading institutions rapidly building expertise in APIs, the cloud, all things ‘data’, microservices, and artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML).

We refer to this phenomenon as the ‘building the emergent enterprise’ – and explore the concept further in Dan’s plenary session.

Innovative approaches that bring out these concepts well from our 2023 winners include:

• A bank transforming its legal department to make it a source of value for digital transformation by moving to digitally-augmented attorneys, reducing time-consuming manual work and allowing human legal staff to focus on high-value tasks.
  
  
• A wealth management firm that modernized its approach to connecting client prospects with a financial advisor through a cloud-native algorithm-based matching system, democratizing access to top-tier financial advice and planning.
  
  
• A global bank streamlining its risk initiatives by implementing an AI-based anti-money laundering (AML) detection platform across the bank, with consistent results on complex transactions, relying on fewer people than were required in the previous siloed approach with heritage processes.
  
  

And reflecting on “what’s next?”

There are points in time where an event forces us to check-in on our assumptions for technology maturity. Although not a new technological concept, LLMs (large language models) have hit that point in recent months following the latest releases of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Bard, Meta’s LLaMA, and others. When combined with other AI techniques, such as video generation as demonstrated with “Jenny” and Dan’s use of both Synthesia’s avatar and OpenAI’s ChatGPT during the plenary session, it’s not hard to see how technologies like these have the potential to fundamentally rethink how we deliver customer experience and advice across the industry opening up new possibilities for operating models.

Where and how this technology will evolve is yet to be seen, and Celent has been monitoring it, with its blogs and a series of reports about the potential usefulness of LLMs across financial services. Expect to see more in the coming months.

Large language models will have profound implications, which we’re only beginning to see. Some FIs will choose to embrace this new tool, while others are already putting up guardrails around it. Every firm should monitor this space to firmly grasp both the opportunities and risks it may present.

Promisingly, LLMs may allow skilled humans to focus on high value tasks; uncover new insights by analyzing vast amounts of disparate data; and create realistic media. Potential risks include that skilled humans may be put out of work; technology may return nonsense that needs to be identified and eliminated; and fraud may become easier, emphasizing the need for effective detection initiatives.

Congratulations! Celent’s 2023 Model Award Winners

What would it look like for a firm to do everything right with today’s technology?

This is the question that Celent’s annual Model Awards seek to answer, recognizing excellence in technology in the financial services industry. 2023’s winning entries highlight real world examples of how technology drives innovation. Our 47 Celent Model Award winners were selected among ~260 submissions from 170 FIs in approximately 50 countries.

Access award winner case studies videos and reports in each category:

• Celent Model Bank 2023 Award winners
  
  
• Celent Model Buy Side & Sell Side Award winners
  
  
• Celent Model Insurer 2023 Award winners
  
  
• Celent Model Risk Manager 2023 Award winners
  
  
• Celent Model Wealth Manager 2023 Award winners

If you have an amazing project or innovation that you think is worthy of recognition, why not take part? Submissions for Celent’s 2024 Model Awards program will open June 28, 2023 and close October 13, 2023.

And finally, fancy continuing the conversation?

If this year’s program has sparked an idea or question, why not get in touch? To set up a meeting with one of Celent’s analysts, please message us or connect with us on Twitter (@Celent_Research).

Finally, we also invite you to attend our in-person event, Navigating Turbulence: Technologies to Weather the Storm, on Thursday, May 4th, in New York. This event is for Financial Institutions only.