Artificial Intelligence Applications in Financial Technology

Dear Colleagues,

Financial technology (fintech) refers to the use of information technology to simplify, improve, reshape, and automate financial processes and services for businesses and customers. In the financial world, many processes and services rely heavily on humans, resulting in mistakes, inefficiency, compliance issues, and penalty fines. They may involve document handling and communications between agents and customers, supervisors and subordinates, and institutions and regulators. Fintech allows various financial institutions to manipulate many of these processes and services with electronic devices, which can work 24/7 in the same standard more efficiently. In particular, artificial intelligence (AI) equips machines with human cognitive skills so that certain tasks can now be automated, especially related to image, natural language, and speech. For example, we can covert handwritten documents or printouts into electronic formats for further analysis. Natural language processing facilitates useful information extraction in a piece of text, and speech recognition allows us to analyze a conversation. Fintech has become an essential tool to the global BFSI (banking, financial services, and insurance) industry, and it has been branched out into specific disciplines, e.g., regtech for management of regulatory processes, suptech for regulatory supervision and oversight, and insurtech for new insurance product and solution designs. This Special Issue therefore seeks to contribute to the agenda of AI applications in fintech through enhanced scientific and multidisciplinary knowledge to improve performance and deployment by bringing focus to various AI technologies suitable for BFSI in order to meet technical, social, and economic goals. We are particularly interested in investigating how AI technologies contribute to the financial industry, and vice versa. We therefore invite papers on innovative technical developments, reviews, and analytical as well as assessment papers from different disciplines which are relevant to integration of AI and fintech. Topics of interest for publication include but are not limited to:

• Chatbots in fintech
• Natural language processing
• Speech cognition and synthesis
• Image recognition
• AI-powered personalized banking
• Complex system application (including ESG)
• User behavior analysis
• Fraud detection
• Anti-money laundering
• Consistent customer services
• Cryptocurrency
• Cybersecurity

Dr. Albert Y.S. Lam
Dr. Yanhui Geng
Topic Editors