Phase Change President Steve Brothers was recently interviewed for an article in The Fintech Times that considers the role AI could soon play in the financial industry. The article, "Phase Change: AI Powers the Future of Financial Services — Just Not in the Ways You Think," examines how AI will help maintain the software that runs the global financial enterprises, as well as other mainframe-based industries.
AI is already utilized by financial-industry players to automate investments, insurance, trading, banking services, and risk management, primarily on mainframes originally developed in the 1960s. Mainframe computing systems provide high security; high-speed, high-volume transaction processing; and reliable uptime. However, they can be complicated to use and require constant maintenance. Plus, they struggle to evolve quickly enough to support the increasing number of banking services supported by cloud mobility and big data.
New AI technologies can soon be used to automate software maintenance by helping developers better comprehend the source code — and make changes rapidly and precisely. The programmers that developed and maintained these huge and complex systems are in high demand (and are paid like it) or aging out of the workforce, and the financial institutions that rely on them are scrambling to understand the codebases with less experienced developers.
Rather than relying on knowledge transfer protocols to pass along specialized domain and program knowledge, financial institutions can now deploy advanced AI-powered tools to automate the process of identifying specific code that requires attention, regardless of how entangled that code is throughout the system.
Todd Erickson is a Technology Writer with Phase Change. You can reach him at terickson@phasechange.ai.