Unlocking the benefits of Natural Language Generation for the world’s financial institutions

ALIX found that 66% of financial reports are data-driven and can be written automatically

Natural Language Generation (NLG), in its simplest definition, uses artificial intelligence to produce meaningful phrases and sentences in the form of natural language. It automatically generates narratives that describe, summarize, or explain structured data at the impressive speed of thousands of pages per second.

NLG is becoming increasingly popular and is commonly applied to the production of reports (including weather and medical reports), image captions, and chatbots. It also powers sports coverage and earnings reports for outlets such as The Associated Press (AP), and the use cases for what has also been referred to as ‘data storytelling’ are continuing to grow.

Removing the pain points from financial reporting

As the digital economy gathers pace, NLG has a crucial role to play in the financial arena. Financial reporting remains an intense weight for large, global organizations. Despite occurring predictably and regularly, it puts significant stress on the resources of teams, who often struggle with the demands of consolidating data, writing reports, and workflows disrupted by the pandemic. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Financial reporting comprises mostly repetitive tasks that can be easily automated.

At Yseop, we’re applying NLG to structured data in order to create written narratives, reducing the burden on professionals across the world by equipping them with the tools to create reports automatically. Not only does this save time, but automated teams are also proven to be more agile and accurate, which is a game-changer for a company’s staff, as well as the regulator.

Our research found that financial analysts spend 48% of their time writing and updating reports. Yseop’s automation tool, Augmented Financial Analyst, unlocks a host of benefits for banks and other financial institutions:

• Empowering analysts. Automating financial reports enables teams to focus on more valuable and strategic work, empowering them with more insights to drive a better standard of decision-making.
• Reducing cost. Automatically generated, data-driven reports save time, resources, and therefore operational costs.
• Improving accuracy. The application of NLG removes the risk of manual human errors in reporting, ensuring high quality and accuracy as standard.
• Increasing efficiency. Automation streamlines processes and produces high volumes of reports at a much faster pace whilst maintaining critical levels of consistency.

Given these advantages, it’s no surprise that Tier 1 financial institutions are starting to deploy the technology at scale to automate report writing. Despite this, it’s been difficult for many business end-users to understand exactly which reports can be automated without technology specialists’ help.

Take the first step with ALIX

It’s for this reason we launched ALIX in March 2021 – which represents a major milestone in our delivery of end-to-end intelligent automation.

ALIX is a free tool that shows banks and other institutions what percentage of a financial report can be written automatically via Yseop’s natural language generation solution – Augmented Financial Analyst.

Through ALIX, business end-users can determine in less than a minute what portion of their reports, such as annual financial statements, fund performance, or risk and compliance reports, can be automated. Based on our sophisticated pre-trained algorithm, ALIX provides an immediate analysis of the uploaded financial report and identifies what can be automated on the Augmented Financial Analyst platform. 

It’s really simple to use. Firstly, the user uploads a PDF document containing an existing financial report from their business. ALIX will then process the report to understand the content and figure out exactly what percentage it would be able to automate for the user.

It’s therefore a great way to showcase just how quickly and easily financial institutions can transform and grow their business through intelligent report automation using our Augmented Financial Analyst solution. Through extensive testing and user interaction, we’ve found that the 48% of an analyst’s time that’s spent writing and updating reports falls to just 9% when using Augmented Financial Analyst. This represents a significant ROI for financial institutions.

This is a huge opportunity for the financial services industry and one that the banks and other institutions can’t afford to miss as they seek to streamline operations and fuel their post-pandemic growth.

To illustrate, and to support the launch of ALIX, we conducted an in-depth study of quarterly reports from 20 high-profile, globally present banks, including JP Morgan, HSBC, and Deutsche Bank. 

We downloaded the reports, ran them through ALIX, and discovered that, on average, 66% of their reports are data-driven and can be written automatically. This figure was as high as 87% for one bank and 72% on average for banks in Europe and North America.

To truly boost AI adoption, it’s critical to enable business users to see the multiple benefits and deploy them without intensive, specialized tech support. ALIX proves intelligent report automation is within their reach – it’s the first step to adopting solutions such as Augmented Financial Analyst.

ALIX is publicly available and free to use. To try it out for yourself, and to find out how our Augmented Financial Analyst solution can re-engineer your reporting process, click here.