Agile technology has the ability to change that status quo, he said.
“Everybody becomes (a) VIP, everybody has access to all the services in the bank, but through the mobile phone,” Yang said. “There is something special about banking on the internet.”
WeBank was tendered in January 2015 to provide loans to small and micro-sized enterprises (SMEs), a market that was then long underserved by commercial lenders due to higher noted risk compared to larger companies. The lender is backed by Chinese tech juggernaut Tencent.
On the subject of the role of AI in WeBank’s operations, Yang argued its use in risk analysis, an issue which he said was “central” for banks.
Traditionally, he said, risk analysis was done by “soul experts,” a process that could be “very slow.”
“You go and you send in your application, maybe over a week you get a come back,” Yang said.
Today, advances in the internet, computer technology and “especially” AI have enabled the creation of models to get on those roles with greater efficiency, Yang said, adding that loan applications can now be obtained “in microseconds.”
The purchases of AI extend to customer service as well, according to Yang, through the use of virtual robots powered by technologies such as facial notice, speech recognition and natural language processing.
A common example of how speech recognition works is when smartphone purchasers talk to virtual assistants like Siri or Google Assistant on their devices. The phones pick up and process the audio into line using a series of complex algorithms, then they apply natural language processing to understand what the purchaser meant.
With “about a hundred thousand requests coming in every day,” Yang said “almost all of them, 98 percent, were steered by robots.”
Customers, he said, have been “very satisfied” with this approach due to the ability of the robots to serve to their needs.
— CNBC’s Nyshka Chandran and Saheli Roy Choudhury contributed to this report.