Canada’s largest bank recently unveiled the details around a new technological advancement.
The Royal Bank of Canada has formally announced “ATOM,” or the financial titan’s “Asynchronous Temporal Model.”
The proprietary foundation model for financial services enables the bank to leverage insights and develop solutions for RBC within an AI framework, according to a statement from the institution.
“ATOM represents the future of banking at RBC,” says Foteini Agrafioti, who serves RBC as the company’s chief science officer.
Initially developed by RBC research institute Borealis in 2023 and functioning as part of the bank’s Lumina platform, ATOM was trained using large-scale financial datasets including billions of client financial transactions, providing it with “a unique breadth of knowledge in financial services.”
Indeed, “several” RBC products and services already leverage ATOM’s capabilities, according to the firm.
“It helps to personalize products and services at an individual level and enables us to more deeply understand our clients’ individual circumstances,” Agrafioti says of ATOM. “As such, we will be able to tailor our services for each client and fully utilize the breadth and insights of RBC data while maintaining privacy and security.”
One use case is responsible lending by ensuring clients have access to credit that aligns with their needs and financial capacity.
“Applying AI to credit adjudication has provided an opportunity to evolve decisioning to ensure the best customer outcomes and increased levels of personalization in a way that wouldn’t be possible with traditional adjudication models and processes,” argues Gopala Narayanan, who helps manage risk at RBC. “Adjudication benefits from AI’s strength in pattern recognition, ability to consume large volumes of data at velocity, and where needed, continuously learn, and refine models.”
ATOM is also being used for Avion Rewards to enhance the ability to provide personalized recommendations which are applied to the Avion Redemption Newsletter that is viewed by 1.3 million users per month.
“Applying ATOM to Avion Rewards has allowed us to streamline our offerings and recommendations to members, creating an incredible opportunity to deliver personalization on a large scale with an engaged audience,” noted Simon Maycock, the Senior Vice President of Loyalty at RBC.
ATOM is currently under review to add value to other products and services, says RBC technology head Bruce Ross.
“RBC believes that AI has the ability to change what a bank is capable of,” Ross said. “That’s why we’ve spent the last decade investing in AI talent, building models, and organizing our data in a safe, sound operational environment. Now we can pull the right details and insights to understand our clients’ needs and provide them with an exceptional experience.”
Ranking among Canada’s most valuable brands, RBC this year invested in Toronto fintech d1g1t and collaborated with Toronto’s Carbonhound.
Leave a Reply