A review of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning adoption in banks, during the COVID-19 outbreak

The Covid-19 outbreak had a profound effect on many industries, and the financial sector was not an exception. Due to all the constraints imposed during this unprecedented event, banks had to rapidly reassess their strategies and adapt to new ways of working, without compromising the quality of their services, nor put their clients at risk. On the other side, the customer behavior changed too, mainly due to a significant movement of economy in the online world. Even though digitalization was not new to the financial institutions, the banks’ willingness to invest and customers’ readiness to adopt new technologies was not consistent, but the pandemic increased the pressure on banks to quickly find new opportunities and accelerated the deployment of data-driven technologies, while customers were compelled to embrace them and change their behavior. The main purpose of this paper is to understand the use of emerging technologies in mitigating the impact of the pandemic, but also the main changes and value add in key area fields like customer experience, process optimization and cost-savings, but also in the fraud detection and risk management areas. Moreover, the articles and studies considered for this paper highlighted the significant progress of banks in their digitalization journey during times of pandemic, mainly due to a rapid move of services in the online world. However, this shift is not risk-free, the reason why organizations need to consider the cybersecurity challenges and acknowledge the vulnerabilities of their platforms to take preventive measures to avoid or minimize potential negative effects.