Episode 12 | The Dangers of Using Chat GPT in FinTech

Chat GPT has taken the world by storm in recent months. In Episode 12 of The Disruptive Mindset Podcast we spoke to Alex Jimenez, the Managing Principal of Financial Services Consulting at EPAM Systems, to talk about the use of this new technology FinTech. Read on to hear his insights on using generative AI for financial advice.

“Generative AI has created an incredible buzz recently, and it’s starting to get people to think about technology differently. Unfortunately, they often think that they can put anything into generative AI and it’ll give them the answers, which we know isn’t true. Just recently I heard someone tell me that they were going to roll out a bank chatbot that’s connected to Chat GPT, and my reaction was ‘Oh, my God, don’t do that!’ It’s not secure or regulated at all.

Chat GPT is an AI chatbot or language model. It’s all built to answer prompts, but as we’ve seen several times, just because it’s answer seems right doesn’t mean it is. It’s also not built to be giving advice to a banking customer. I see these articles that keep coming up saying ‘I asked Chat GPT what stocks I should buy for the next five years’, and that’s completely the wrong application. Chat GPT was built to give you a grammatically correct sentence using statistical analysis of language, not to tell you how to invest in the stock market.

Funnily enough, one of the things that I first did with Chat GPT was ask it about me. It didn’t find anything about me, but it gave a response saying I had started an agency 20 years ago, that I had just started a FinTech company, and that I had a degree from a university in San Francisco. I knew exactly where the data was coming – it was a former boss of mine, not me. Chat GPT put my name on his biography. I asked ‘what are the sources of this information?’ and it gave me a whole list of sources, all of which were made up. There was a LinkedIn entry which went nowhere because the source didn’t really exist. I clicked on several of the links to websites, but all of them were 404 errors. All of this was made up.

That shows the capability of AI. It can write convincing text, but it isn’t reliable enough to give advice for a bank. God forbid you give someone financial advice from it. Regulators are not going to be happy if you’re giving advice that’s totally incorrect. There are reasons why people are trained for months or years before doing that job, and why advisors have certifications and credentials. Will they be replaced by a Chat GPT type model? Possibly. But not this one. This was not built for that.”

To learn more about the technology emerging in the FinTech space, tune into The Disruptive Mindset Podcast here.