ORLANDO, Fla.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Gartner, Inc. has announced the winners of the 2018 Gartner Eye on Innovation Award for financial services in the Americas. The award recognizes innovative use of digital technology-enabled capabilities, products or services to highlight “best-in-class” financial industry initiatives launched within the past 12 months and to offer insight about developments in digital innovation.
The finalists presented their case studies during Gartner Symposium/ITxpo, which is taking place here through Thursday, and BMO Bank of Montreal was selected as the regional 2018 Gartner Eye on Innovation Award Americas winner by the attendees at the event. Allstate and Liberty Mutual Insurance were also named as award recipients.
Regional Winner:
BMO Bank of Montreal — BMO Bank of Montreal created an entirely new way to pay bills by applying machine learning capabilities to recognize the biller, payee, account number, amount and due date across a range of corporations and statement formats. This technology uniquely addressed customer pain points to enable full adoption of digital bill payments. The solution is currently in beta testing against hundreds of bills and Canadian digital banking users. Results show a 90 percent acceptance rate among the test demographic, and a significant cost savings with bill-payment-related call volumes and branch visits having been reduced by more than 350 percent.
Additional Award Recipients:
Allstate — Partnering with a major ride-sharing innovator to provide commercial insurance coverage led Allstate to revolutionize its commercial insurance products, claim creation and handling processes, and all underlying technology. Allstate had to launch a solution to begin taking claims on the set policy effective date, which was only three weeks upon entering into the agreement. A small team of business and technology associates was formed, and they developed an application programming interface (API) to enable integration between the claims systems to ingest claims from an external party. They used test-driven development with continuous integration and delivery practices to rapidly develop a JAVA, RESTful API in the cloud. They leveraged internal security patterns and gateway technologies to create secure B2B connectivity between the ride-sharing company and Allstate, thereby reducing claim creation clerical effort and handling times. This solution, which was delivered in 21 days, has opened a wealth of opportunities for new commercial auto policy types, revenue streams for transportation network carriers and other shared economy organizations with disruptive business models.
Liberty Mutual Insurance — Based on employee feedback, Liberty Mutual Insurance sought to create a best-in-class work environment where employees’ technical interactions were as personalized, timely and intuitive as in their everyday lives, ultimately helping them become more productive and engaged. The company built a digital assistant into a unified platform that focuses on simplifying the employee experience by integrating across all the systems within Liberty Mutual to aggregate tasks, approvals, need-to-know information and more — based on employees’ individual needs, defined by role, department and location. The assistant includes a chatbot with intelligent search capabilities. By understanding who employees are and their context, the chatbot provides answers to questions that are personalized to each employee, eliminating the need for employees to siphon through multiple documents and knowledge base resources to find the information they need. This technology has resulted in each employee, on average, saving more than five minutes per week, and with 50,000 employees, that equates to $6 million worth of reclaimed productivity for the company.
Finalists:
Banco do Brasil S.A. — To avoid financial damages, legal risks and image issues stemming from electronic fraud, Banco do Brasil implemented machine learning techniques with mass customization in its development of predictive analytical models representing the legitimate transaction behavior of its 55 million clients. Deployment of this solution led to enhanced fraud detection along with a significant reduction in operational losses.
Capital One — The lack of an easy, secure, reliable way for businesses to verify their consumers’ identities online led Capital One to pioneer the first bank-provided digital identity API in the United States. Capital One’s Identity Services was designed to make digital identity management easier, safer and more transparent for consumers and businesses alike. The company developed and commercialized a real-time, intelligent identity-proofing platform to deliver a trusted identity ecosystem where businesses can leverage Capital One’s advanced identity verification capabilities and consumers can regain control of how and where their identity is being used. This is the first time a U.S. bank has extended its verification capabilities to external businesses across industries, creating value for both businesses and consumers by facilitating trusted interactions that are easy to use, secure and reliable.
Citi — Citi needed a way to engage with customers at scale to better understand their wants and needs and ultimately leverage technology to improve the customer experience. Citi launched the groundbreaking beta-testing community Canvas, designed by Citi. The objective of Canvas was to create a platform open to all Citi customers for Citi’s digital and innovation teams to test their solutions in real-world conditions and receive timely feedback in a less resource-intensive way. Canvas allows rapid development and testing of new features, products and customer experiences at low cost through common components in a secure, controlled environment. As a result, Citi is bringing features to market faster and customers are helping to shape what’s next for the company. The marketing around the Canvas launch reached more than 10 million people and drove an 11 percent increase in favorability of the Citi brand.
Comerica Bank — Retail Banking at Comerica partnered with its internal Innovation Team and a startup called Mursion to use virtual reality (VR) to simulate engagement with customers in virtual Retail Banking Promise Centers. The VR training experience focused on simulating “real-world” situations that Comerica Retail Banking employees were likely to encounter in a Promise Center. Training participants interacted with one to three emotive avatars controlled by a human actor with voice modulation capabilities using a video-enabled laptop or an HTC Vive VR headset, providing participants with the ability to simulate conversations with customers in a safe environment. As a result, participants were able to develop confidence in their abilities and knowledge without the fear of failure, the experience was immersive and engaging, and the outcomes were proven to be superior to traditional training methods.
Liberty Mutual Insurance — The Liberty Mutual Cognitive Technology team set out to solve multiple business problems and improve the customer and employee experience using new conversational interfaces. The team developed a digital assistant, known as the Enterprise Bot Platform, alongside several supporting elements to help others within the company achieve similar goals. The functionality of this platform continues to expand, and the company is realizing significant financial benefits. A digital agent designed to handle repeatable calls related to insurance claims, for example, used to cost an average of $8 per call and now costs $0.25, reducing call costs by 97 percent.
Nationwide Advisory Solutions — With its target audience of independent registered investment advisors (RIAs) and fee-based advisors averse to traditional insurance products due to cost, complexity and limited choice, Nationwide Advisory Solutions pioneered a highly personalized, responsive and adaptable technology engine called the Analytics-Driven Advisor Experience. Employing real-time data management, analytics and artificial intelligence, this intelligent technology stack provides immediate personalization hypertargeted to each advisor, delivering precisely the appropriate educational content and products designed to help them make more informed decisions, grow their business and aid in their clients’ financial goals.
Award submissions were assessed using a robust and dynamic framework to ensure that the assessment process is pertinent and objective. The Gartner Awards Framework (GAF) is utilized as a structured model of assessment that enables the participating organizations to be benchmarked against world-class performance standards. The GAF consists of specialized assessment modules pertaining to the evaluation criteria for each of the submissions. The criteria and subcriteria provide a robust set of requirements that are used as the methodology for benchmarking and learning among the participating organizations.
The identification of a Gartner award winner or finalist is not an endorsement by Gartner of any company, vendor, product or service.
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