A Cognitive Automation Approach for a Smart Lending and Early Warning Application

The rapid development of Internet and the dissemination of information and documents through a myriad of heterogeneous data sources is having an ever-increasing impact on the financialdomain. Corporate and Investment Banks (CIBs) need to improve and automate business and decision-making processes simplifying the way they access data sources to get alternative data andanswers. Manual or traditional approaches to data gathering are not sufficient to effectively and efficiently exploit information contained in all available data sources and represent a bottleneck to processes automation. This paper presents a cognitive automation approach, that makes use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms for automatically and efficiently searching, reading, and understanding documents and contents intended for humans.The paper also presents the system that implements the proposed approach by an application in the area of financial risk evaluation and lending automation. The presented approach allows CIBsto obtain answers and analysis useful to improve the ability of different bank areas to manage lending processes, forecast situations involving risks, facilitate lead generation, and develop customized marketing and sales strategies.