Prampolini (Assiom Forex): banks return to the forefront of innovation

(Il Sole 24 Ore Radiocor Plus) - In a world characterised by ever greater interoperability between physical and virtual, in which information is increasingly valuable, banks must regain the initiative by returning to the forefront of innovation processes. Andrea Prampolini, co-head of Assiom Forex's Fintech Commission, is convinced of this and will be a speaker at the workshop scheduled for Friday 9 February as part of the association's 30th Annual Congress.

The financial system is a complex organism, which has always been at the forefront of technology because it has always had to navigate the shifting terrain where information meets economic value. With the most recent innovations in the digital sphere, information and value seem to have become even more closely linked and in some ways indistinguishable. I would say that the figure of our time lies in the new power of digital representations, which is also measured in terms of their interoperability with the real world. We should not forget that the experience of the recent pandemic made concepts such as the metaverse temporarily plausible, i.e. completely virtual worlds in which one imagined one could experience a new and somewhat freer life. Fortunately, the physical world has not disappeared, but it is now clear to everyone that it has to coexist with new, infinitely more dynamic digital representations that carry value and information at the same time.

First of all, it must be said that the internet now enables the entire service sector. Let me remind you that the internet is an open infrastructure, whose application components are largely based on open source code, i.e. accessible to anyone who can understand it. Not even a quarter of a century has passed since the so-called 'dot-com bubble' burst, the Internet speculative bubble, which in two years from 2000 to 2002 had led the US Nasdaq index of technology stocks to lose three quarters of its value. In 2009, during another period of crisis, the first network for the transfer of digital assets, the Bitcoin protocol, was born from an open source implementation, which in the meantime has in turn experienced reputational and market ups and downs. Today, digital assets are undergoing a phase of institutionalisation, characteristic of the development of interoperability between the digital and physical worlds I mentioned, particularly in such a sensitive segment of the economy as money. For instance, cash in a few years' time could coexist with new electronic forms of sovereign currencies, such as the digital euro.

The most recent developments in artificial intelligence are radically and irreversibly changing our ideas about the production of natural language and its structure. In essence, we have realised that it is possible to mathematically model human language in vector spaces of high dimensions, on the order of hundreds of dimensions. The discovery offers unprecedented opportunities in the evolution of the interaction between people and machines, and in the automation of cognitive tasks. In this perspective, artificial intelligence is experiencing a new springtime; but in the past, it too went through 'winter' phases like other innovative technologies (we spoke about it with reference to the Internet and digital assets). Evidently, in this season, financial institutions do not have the same agility and clarity of vision as large technology companies; I believe that at least part of the roots can be found in the repercussions of the 2009 crisis, which at various times forced banks to prioritise financial stability considerations, sometimes to the detriment of investments. But it was not always so: for instance, in the last century, the automatic reading of bank cheques was a frontier application of artificial intelligence. Now that the era of paper cheques is coming to an end to make way for digital transactions, the hope is that banks can regain the initiative by confidently and competently activating paths of innovation in their production processes.