J.P. Morgan Payments is creating a conversational analytics assistant, a GenAI application that could have the power to significantly enhance the corporate treasurer experience by making complicated data more accessible.
At the end of 2023, the bank took stock of the opportunities posed by Gen AI with a lens of efficiency gains for those working in payments – specifically those in corporate treasury.
Benefits of GenAI within the treasury function:
- Productivity: Text generation, summarization and knowledge retrieval capabilities could provide reconciliation productivity gains by improving the link between payments and their corresponding invoices. Card dispute responses may also see a boost in productivity by summarizing unstructured responses from merchants and customers.
- Efficiency: Code generation and revision capabilities may provide the payments ecosystem with a more efficient way to provide developer-ready code for embedding payments in commerce applications.
- Customer experience: Chatbots and virtual assistants may become more powerful, enabling more effective customer service by allowing deeper-level questioning and real-time responses in plain terms.
JP Morgan’s new AI-based tool aims to enable treasurers to retrieve information, generate custom reports and run complex analytics on their financial data through plain language prompts instead of coding.
Potential capabilities include creating visualizations, analyzing changes in account balances over time, calculating payment frequencies and organizing currency flows.
With a conversational analytics assistant like this, prompts and questions such as ‘show me a bar chart that captures how balances across my different accounts have changed over the last 3 months’ could be answered clearly and in seconds.
Self-Driving Treasury on the Horizon
Looking ahead, J.P. Morgan believes conversational interfaces like this could evolve into AI-driven recommendations and even automated execution within defined parameters set by clients.
Not only could GenAI provide insights to corporate treasurers, it could evolve into providing recommendations that can streamline workstreams, save companies time and money and help identify potential human errors or fraud.
Prototype Shows Promise
While open banking has expanded treasurers’ access to data, leveraging it remains difficult without coding expertise. To address this gap, J.P. Morgan Payments has already developed a prototype conversational assistant that allows treasurers to query their payments data conversationally.
In initial testing, clients were able to complete information retrieval, reporting and analytics tasks that used to take days within seconds using the ChatGPT-like interface.
The prototype was built by engaging directly with corporate treasurers to ensure it solves real-world problems they face in managing flows of payments and cash. J.P. Morgan said its existing expertise in payments and technology innovation enabled rapid development of the solution.
The company says it will continue gathering feedback from early users as it looks to improve the product’s capabilities and user experience ahead of a broader launch.