Leveraging Slack's New AI Features for Smarter Financial Services Teams
Financial services firms like banks, insurance providers, and wealth and asset management companies handle highly sensitive data daily. They must securely collaborate to make investment decisions, process claims, advise clients, and keep operations running smoothly. Artificial intelligence can help accelerate and enhance this work. Slack, the leading business communication platform for enterprise teams, has recently launched powerful new AI capabilities to help financial services teams work smarter. This blog post provides an overview of these features and examples of how firms use them.
Slack’s Enterprise-Grade Security and Compliance Standards
Before adopting any new technology, financial institutions must ensure it meets strict industry regulations around data privacy, confidentiality, and security. Slack prioritizes these needs with enterprise-grade security and compliance. Slack meets major international standards like SOC 2, ISO 27001, and GDPR, as well as financial industry requirements such as FINRA and HIPAA. It offers robust access controls, encryption for data at rest and in transit, and integration with security solutions. Customers have full ownership over conversation data stored in Slack. For secure external collaboration, Slack Connect allows the creation of encrypted channels with partners, vendors, and clients. All messages within Connect channels benefit from Slack’s enterprise security capabilities.
Slack’s AI Features Help Teams Work Smarter
Slack recently announced major AI-powered upgrades to help teams get more value from conversations already happening on the platform. These features use machine learning to surface relevant information from past discussions and provide helpful, concise answers conversationally.
AI-Powered Search
Slack’s AI search capabilities allow teams to find information from past conversations as easily as asking a colleague sitting next to them. Users can search in natural language as they would speak to another person. For example, asking, “When is our weekly operations sync meeting?” will provide the exact date, time, channel, and participants without needing to remember keywords or filter through results. AI search understands context to return the most relevant information.
Channel Recaps and Thread Summaries
Slack also automatically generates recaps of channels and summaries of threads to highlight the most important discussions users may have missed. Recaps provide quick overviews of recent activity, including highlights like files shared or decisions made. Thread summaries concisely compile the key points and outcomes from potentially lengthy back-and-forth conversations into easily digestible snippets. These features save financial services teams from having to read through hundreds of messages manually to stay updated. Users can quickly understand what they missed and feel confident contributing to existing discussions.
Real-World AI Use Cases
Financial institutions globally are already using Slack’s AI capabilities to enhance productivity, decision-making and customer experience.
Productivity: HSBC has built an AI-powered knowledge base on Slack using answers from past conversations, documents, and web pages. Development teams can now quickly find solutions without asking the same questions repeatedly. This has increased productivity by 26%.
Investment Decisions: UK-based investment manager M&G is using Slack channel recaps to help employees spot key data points from investment research conversations in a timely manner. Making this insight readily available to more employees has improved collaboration and innovation.
Customer Service: Insurance provider Lemonade built an AI bot on Slack to assign claims to agents with relevant expertise. This has decreased claim processing time from hours to minutes, improving customer satisfaction.
External Collaboration: Slack Connect allows Australian digital bank Up to securely collaborate with external partners through encrypted channels. They built an AI assistant to resolve customer queries faster through Slack Connect conversations with partners. This has reduced resolution time by 30%.
Integrations with Financial Services Apps
Slack integrates with over 2,200 apps via its platform, including specialized tools for financial services like:
- Salesforce Financial Services Cloud: Centralize client records and conversations in Slack.
- Adobe Sign: Get secure e-signatures on agreements within Slack workflows.
- AWS Key Management Service (KMS): Encrypt Slack data with AWS keys for added security.
- Workday: quickly access time off requests and approve team members' daily/weekly timesheets
By consolidating applications into Slack channels, teams save time switching between systems and have all relevant data in one place to make decisions faster.
The Takeaway
With powerful new AI capabilities, enterprise-grade security, and deep financial services integrations, Slack empowers financial institutions to collaborate securely and unlock productivity gains at scale.
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