Small bank, big moves: Why a bottom-up strategy beats rip-and-replace in Gen AI
- In this special series on small banks and FIs, we are exploring how these firms can remain compete with larger FIs, despite of budget and resource constraints.
- In our last article in this series we discuss what implementations strategies work best for small FIs, breakdown a full implementation plan, and how executives can manage the culture and hiring piece to fit the evolving technological landscape.
In our last article, we covered why Gen AI can help small banks remain competitive and improve six specific use cases: fraud detection, customer service automation, personalized marketing, document and data processing, knowledge bases, and operational analytics.
In this article, we will explore what implementation strategies work the best for these use cases, how to align the culture piece with the technological adoption to render plans into reality and build for competitiveness and efficiency.
The implementation playbook
Complete overhauls are difficult to undertake and don’t work well for Gen AI implementation. Gen AI is new, and the regulations, technological infrastructure, and providers around it are still developing, making a rip-and-replace approach risky.
Therefore, institutions with less than $10 billion in assets would be better served if they think bottom-up. That means identifying point solutions and specific use cases that are likely to have a sizable impact. Learnings from these roll-outs can then be used and workshopped to build a firm-wide strategy.
Ryan Lockard, Principal at Deloitte recommends the following six-step plan:
