Citi & IBM Explore Watson Technologies

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

Citibank continuously explores new ways to ensure it is lending responsibly and acting in the best interest of customers and becoming 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. 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. 

"At Citi, we are constantly developing new, innovative ways to better serve our customers' financial needs...We are working to rethink and redesign the various ways in which our customers 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," says Don Callahan, Citi's Chief Administrative Officer and Chief Operations & Technology Officer..

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.  Watson can help accelerate and assist decision makers in identifying opportunities, evaluating risks, and exploring alternative actions that are best suited for their clients.

“The collaboration between IBM and Citi offers a glimpse of the future of financial management. Applying Watson technologies in the consumer financial market will help empower financial professionals to make better business decisions that represent a significant step in delivering on the promise of a more personalized banking in the 21st century" said Mariels Almeda Winhoffer, President and Country General Manager, IBM Philippines.

Celebrating its 200th anniversary this year, Citi has a long history of working with IBM on key innovations to advance the use of information technology in the financial services industry. In 1954, the two companies announced the first use of an "electronic brain" that reduced the time required for a cost-benefit analysis from 1,000 man-hours to nine and a half minutes. Today, the companies are continuing those efforts.

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 can help accelerate and improve decision-making across a variety of industries.

Follow Watson on Facebook:  www.facebook.com/ibmwatson. For more information, you may visit www.ibmwatson.com. To join the social discussion about Watson include the hashtag #ibmwatson in a tweet.

What can you say about the Citi and IBM collaboration on Watson Technologies ?