AI Impact Awards in Finance: How Top Companies Boost Efficiency and Fight Fraud
Financial institutions managing vast assets need precision and efficiency. Three winners of Newsweek's AI Impact Awards in Finance demonstrate how AI can streamline operations, save costs, improve employee well-being, and strengthen fraud protection.
Principal Financial Group
Kathy Kay, Executive Vice President and CIO at Principal Financial Group, highlights AI's role in smarter decisions, personalized customer experiences, and enhanced risk management. She stresses the importance of investing equally in data literacy, ethical frameworks, and collaboration alongside technology.
Principal Financial Group, a Fortune 500 company with $712 billion in assets under management, tackled internal inefficiencies by developing PAIGE (Principal Artificial Intelligence Generative Experience). This AI assistant automates content creation, training materials, and marketing content using advanced analytics.
Kay explains that routine tasks like document management and employee onboarding consumed too much time, while explaining complex financial topics clearly remained a challenge. PAIGE addresses these issues by generating compliant documents, simplifying financial language, and handling routine tasks, allowing employees to focus on complex customer needs.
Since its launch, PAIGE has grown to over 800 active users, reducing task completion time by 50% across various functions. Customer onboarding time dropped from over 20 days to just three, enabling the company to serve 40% more clients over five years. PAIGE also supports Principal’s mission to make financial security accessible to everyone by breaking down barriers in financial planning.
ABBYY
With over 30 years of experience, ABBYY focuses on AI-powered document processing and automation, serving more than 10,000 customers, including Fortune 500 companies and global brands. CFO Brian Unruh emphasizes the need to improve operational excellence to reduce friction internally and with customers.
ABBYY won the AI Impact Award for Best Outcomes in Accounting by helping clients like Bapcor and Norco streamline invoice processing. Their Document AI solution reduced manual entry, cut overtime, and lowered labor costs significantly.
For Norco, ABBYY’s system halved labor costs related to invoice handling. Bapcor shifted away from printed invoices and manual data entry, improving efficiency and employee satisfaction. Unruh stresses that AI solutions must address actual problems and operate responsibly.
Instnt
Instnt uses AI to combat fraud in financial services by transferring residual losses to the insurance market, saving businesses millions in operational and treasury costs. The company won Newsweek's AI Impact Award for Best Outcomes in Mitigating Fraud.
Sunil Madhu, Instnt’s founder and CEO, points out that fraud accounts for 4–5% of global GDP losses. Instnt’s AI-driven Fraud Loss Insurance Solution detects fraud and makes it insurable, allowing businesses to shift financial risk off their balance sheets.
This approach lets institutions improve margins and grow without sacrificing fraud control. Unlike existing solutions, Instnt offers insurance-backed protection combined with machine learning risk assessments. Their system analyzes historical fraud, customizes coverage, and identifies fraudulent transactions in real time.
Businesses can file claims and receive payouts within 30 days. One major digital bank reduced a $45 million fraud exposure to an $8 million insurance cost using Instnt’s solution, illustrating significant financial impact.
Conclusion
AI is proving essential in finance for automating routine tasks, reducing costs, improving customer experiences, and mitigating fraud risk. From Principal Financial Group’s AI assistant increasing productivity, ABBYY’s document automation cutting labor hours, to Instnt’s fraud insurance solution protecting margins, these companies demonstrate practical ways AI drives value.
If you’re in finance or customer support, exploring AI tools can help you work smarter. For more on AI applications in finance and practical training, consider visiting Complete AI Training’s finance AI tools page.
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