AI in currency

Artificial intelligence is quietly transforming consumer-facing industries. The first of a three-part series looks at how it is rewriting the rules of modern banking

- SHELLEY SINGH

Similarly, credit memos that once took bankers several days to prepare are now being auto-generated in minutes. AI reads financial documents, fetches data from APIs, and presents a risk summary that a human analyst then reviews and approves.

Pandharkar of EY India explains with an example: Suppose an auto ancillary company asks for a ₹12 crore inventory loan. They would need to analyze three years of profit and loss account, balance sheet, goods and services tax (GST) filing, bank statements, Udyog Aadhaar (for small businesses), credit scores, fraud checks, PAN verifications, and so on. Earlier, at least two analysts spent five working days putting this together. Now using GenAI, the system carries out the necessary checks, goes through 300 pages of source material, all in less than 10 minutes, and generates a five-page credit memo.

Banks are also deploying AI to read and interpret complex PDFs, summarize reports, and even conduct sentiment analysis of customer conversations.

"The real gain is in the time saved," says Pandharkar. "AI can read 300 pages in seconds. Humans can't compete with that—so the model becomes augmentation, not replacement."

Armed with intelligence provided by AI, human workload is reduced, shifting from the drudgery of going through multiple documents and several hundred pages, to, say, issuing loans or taking the final call. As Kanwar of Confluent India puts it: "We are moving from delayed intelligence to always-on intelligence."

In customer service functions, banks are deploying AI-powered voice bots that replace clunky IVRs. Instead of navigating phone menus, a customer simply says, "I need my tax certificate," and gets it.