Pelican
Pioneering Artificial Intelligence in Banking

When others thought that the banking industry was too nascent to ratify the adoption of real-time technologies, seasoned aficionado, Parth Desai decided that it was time to put his daring theory to test. Pelican emerged as the answer to his high-octane effort of roping in a sophisticated technology like artificial intelligence (AI) into the realms of the financial arena. “We have been working around payments and compliance in the banking vertical for more than 20 years, focusing on embedding AI to provide real-life solutions that are practical and intelligent,” says Desai, Founder and CEO, Pelican. The company delivers outstanding efficiency benefits and cost savings to its customers in over 55 countries and to date, Pelican has processed more than one billion transactions worth over $5 trillion.

The Pelican team is comprised of visionary world-class talent from the fintech and payments industries. Desai explains, “Our solutions are made possible by a mastery of three key disciplines of AI: Natural Language Processing (NLP) that enables the human-like understanding of transactional information and data; knowledge-based systems that create the ability to reason using common sense and industry specific knowledge; and machine learning that gives us the capacity to securely learn and adapt, based on previous patterns of behavior.”

As the banking industry evolves, so do the solutions offered by Pelican. Not only do they continually incorporate innovative technology, but they also acclimatize to the domain changes. Additionally, Desai predicts that banks will be faced with new regulations in the years to come. “Banking will be different in the year 2020 and we are prepping up banks to get accustomed to the new scenarios that will open up competition from other banks as well as fintech companies.”

Previously, the use of AI-based solutions was limited to the back-office operations where it was not seen by customers. Today it is quickly moving to a front-office position involving interactions with customers.

Banking will be different in the year 2020 and we are prepping up banks to get accustomed to the new scenarios

Chatbots and robot advisors are able to utilize information based on the customer and the context to provide unique responses automatically. This reduces the need for human interaction within activities such as sales, customer service, and verification procedures.

With the Pelican platform, every transaction and scenario can be analyzed, regardless of the format and language, through AI that simulates human thought. By analyzing this data, they can add more insights into their solutions to improve the intelligence. On the compliance side, Pelican has been able to reduce the false positive rate by 70 percent, helping several banks to make drastic improvements to their operations, increase efficiencies, and most importantly, reduce costs.

As technology in the financial industry becomes more concentrated and developed, Pelican is focused on innovation. Customers will no longer be tied to one system within their bank and the bank itself will exist as a place to store money, with outside vendors having access to the data in order to provide services to the customer. “With the changing landscape, we are focused on integrating open API and new technologies to bring new value-added, ease-of-use services that will provide a platform for banks to profit from this open data environment,” shares Desai. Pelican has set itself apart from the competition because not only do they have a deep understanding of how the individual technologies work but they are able to bring them together to offer real-life practical solutions that benefit both the banks and their customers.