Citigroup Exploring Use of IBM Watson

Citigroup has announced it has entered into an agreement with IBM to explore possible uses for IBM Watson. Under the agreement, Citi will examine the use of deep content analysis and evidence based learning capabilities found in IBM Watson to help advance customer interactions, and improve and simplify the banking experience.

Citi is working to be the leading digital bank, providing customers with the latest technology to enhance and facilitate service. Citi will evaluate ways that IBM Watson technologies can help analyze customer needs and process vast amounts of up-to-the-minute financial, economic, product and client data.

“At Citi, we are constantly developing new, innovative ways to better serve our customers’ financial needs,” said Don Callahan, Citi’s Chief Administrative Officer and Chief Operations & Technology Officer. “We are working to rethink and redesign the various ways in which our customers and clients interact with money. We will collaborate with IBM to explore how we can use the Watson technology to provide our customers with new, secure services designed around their increasingly digital and mobile lives.”

“IBM continues to advance Watson in information-intensive industries,  enabling organizations to quickly gain valuable insights from vast amounts of data that can speed decision making and improve how companies serve their customers,” said Mike Rhodin, Senior Vice President,  IBM Software Solutions. “The collaboration between IBM and Citi will explore how applying Watson in the consumer financial market could help empower financial professionals to make better business decisions and represents a significant step in delivering on the promise of personalized banking in the 21st century.”

Citi will assess ways to use a first-of-a-kind customer interaction solution combined with Watson’s deep-content analytics, natural language processing, decision support, and evidence-based learning to continue to advance digital banking. Watson’s ability to analyze the meaning and context of human language, and quickly process vast amounts of information to suggest options targeted to a consumers’ individual circumstances, can help accelerate and assist decision makers in identifying opportunities, evaluating risks and exploring alternative actions that are best suited for their clients.

About IBM Watson

Watson, named after IBM founder Thomas J. Watson, was built by a team of scientists to accomplish a grand challenge — a computing system that rivals a human’s ability to answer questions posed in natural language with speed, accuracy and confidence. By accurately extracting facts and quickly understanding relationships in large volumes of data, the technology has the potential to help accelerate and improve decision-making across a variety of industries.