Capital One is banking on its cloud maturity to ease AI adoption across business functions. The financial services company was early to migrate and quick to modernize its data ecosystem.
“We gravitate towards using the most advanced cloud services and we have been for a long time,” Aparna Sinha, SVP and head of AI product at Capital One, told CIO Dive. “It's difficult to imagine doing AI at scale without a solid foundation of experience using and scaling applications in cloud.”
As enthusiasm for natural language processing peaked in the wake of ChatGPT’s introduction, Capital One’s technology division was already well positioned to pilot potential use cases, according to an April report on AI adoption in financial services.
“We’ve been researching deep learning and neural networks for quite some time,” Sinha said. “Our goal is also to advance the state of the art in AI research, so we look at it holistically, not only from the point of view of generative AI.”
Research firm Evident ranked the company as second in AI innovation behind JPMorgan Chase, noting that Capital One and Bank of America owned two-thirds of AI patents filed by banks in the 12-month period ending in June 2022. Capital One was responsible for 39% of the total number of filings across the 50 banks Evident analyzed.
As part of the innovation push, Capital One bulked up its AI team over the last year. The company welcomed Sinha, a veteran of Google Cloud’s developer organization, in January after appointing Prem Natarajan chief scientist and head of enterprise AI and Milind Naphade SVP of AI foundations in 2023.
Sinha’s remit is strategic, she said. Her role focuses on partnering with Capital One’s various lines of business to ease implementation and to build and operate the bank’s AI and machine learning platform.
“It's a lot of the nitty gritty product work of figuring out what capabilities the platform should have and what is the sequencing of those capabilities,” Sinha said.
The platform strategy promotes scalability, eases model updates and helps standardize best practices and governance, according to Sinha.
Capital One’s AI initiatives are part of an industrywide trend in finance. Bank of America has invested billions of dollars to prepare its data for AI and intends to invest nearly $4 billion in new tech this year. Citi hired former PwC partner Tim Ryan to spearhead AI transformation last month. And JPMorgan Chase aims to have three-quarters of its data migrated by the end of the year to support analytics and AI.
Currently, Sinha sees value in using generative AI to bolster machine learning and automation capabilities in areas like fraud detection, software development and customer service.
“Combining existing techniques, like image processing, entity extraction and search and retrieval, with natural language processing is what really gives additional value for a whole host of applications within any enterprise — and certainly within banking,” Sinha said.
