15-07-2025
AI Impact Awards 2025: Financial Services Need Efficient, Reliable Solutions
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In the world of finance, efficiency and accuracy are paramount for institutions managing billions in assets around the world.
The three winners of Newsweek's AI Impact Awards in the Finance category are pioneering AI technology to help streamline operations, save time and money, boost employee well-being and protect against fraud.
Principal Financial Group Executive Vice President and Chief Information Officer Kathy Kay told Newsweek that the future of AI in financial services is both exciting and transformative.
"I see it driving smarter decision-making, hyper-personalized customer experiences and stronger risk management," she said over email. "We will see problems being solved in ways we never thought possible so our people can continue to do their best work. But to realize that future responsibly, we need to invest just as much in data literacy, ethical frameworks and cross-functional collaboration as we do in the technology itself. It's not just about what AI can do — it's about how we guide it to create real, sustainable value."
Principal Financial Group is a Fortune 500 investment management and insurance company with $712 billion in total assets under management around the world.
In response to facing critical operation challenges and inefficiencies internally, the company created the Principal Artificial Intelligence Generative Experience (PAIGE) – an AI-powered assistant that automates content generation, training materials and marketing content through advanced analytics.
"Like many growing organizations, we saw opportunities where smarter tools could make a real difference," Kay said. "More specifically, we knew that using technology in the right way could free up our employees' time and allow them to prioritize the most important things – like solving complex customer problems."
Kay said teams were spending too much time on things like managing documents and onboarding new employees and there was a "persistent" challenge with explaining complex financial topics in clear, accessible ways.
"We knew these hurdles were affecting both our internal teams and our ability to communicate consistently with customers," she said.
PAIGE's main functions include creating compliant and efficient documents and training materials, breaking down complicated financial concepts into clear, approachable language and handling routine tasks to improve productivity and allow employees to "focus on what really matters," Kay said.
The company is already seeing measurable results as PAIGE's growth has exceeded expectations, "expanding from initial pilot users to over 800 active users by year-end," according to the company.
There is a 50 percent reduction in task completion time across diverse functions, including client inquiries, while maintaining accuracy metrics with a query acceptance rate exceeding 95 percent and negative feedback remained below 1 percent.
Newsweek Illustration
Customer onboarding time also decreased by 90 percent, down from over 20 days to just three days. This efficiency has enabled the company to service 40 percent more members over five years.
Kay said that PAIGE helps break down barriers to make financial planning more accessible for everyone, exemplifying Principal's core value that everyone deserves a clear path to financial security.
"Simply put, it's here to help us fulfill our promise: making financial security achievable for all," she said. "Whether it's helping our employees work more efficiently or making financial concepts less intimidating, it supports our vision of a world where everyone has the tools and understanding they need to pursue their financial dreams."
ABBYY, a global tech company specializing in AI-powered document processing and automation, also understands the need for efficiency and accuracy when working internally and for clients and partners.
The company has been around for over 30 years and serves over 10,000 customers, including several Fortune 500 companies, McDonald's, Volkswagen, Deloitte, DHL and the National Library of Latvia.
CFO Brian Unruh told Newsweek in an interview that the company has "product superiority," but is hoping to improve its "operational excellence," which is key to really reduce the friction not only how we work team of teams, but how we engage with our customers."
ABBYY is the winner of Newsweek's AI Impact Award for Best Outcomes, Accounting for its work helping Asia-Pacific vehicle part provider Bapcor and Australian dairy cooperative Norco with its advanced Document AI.
According to the company's application, ABBYY was able to reduce the need for manual entry and matching, cut down on overtime and excessive labor costs related to invoice processing, and free up accounts payable employees' time for more fulfilling and value-generating tasks.
ABBYY IDP was able to streamline Norco's invoices for shipping goods to various locations and reduce labor costs by about half, Unruh said. It also helped Bapcor move away from printed invoices and manual data entry to improve efficiency and eliminate overtime – both saving costs and boosting employee satisfaction.
"These aren't edge cases, this is typical," Unruh said, "We find customers that benefit, especially in finance and banking, because they have fiduciary responsibilities for accuracy. And so we come in and we can cut their error rate, and that's hard savings for them."
When adopting AI for business operations, Unruh said it's important to "walk the walk" and demonstrate how the AI solution addresses actual problems or opportunities. It is also important for that solution to be rooted in ethical and responsible practices.
"It's really important that this isn't something that they are recklessly deploying, or it's not long term," he said. "It's one thing about going live, it's another thing [to have] maintenance and make sure that you continue driving the success that you intend."
In the financial world, AI tools are not only helping financial institutions work better, more efficiently, but they are also helping protect against fraud.
Instnt, a venture-backed insurance technology business, uses AI to mitigate fraud risks for businesses and transfers residual losses to the insurance market, saving businesses millions in operational and treasury costs. It is also the winner of Newsweek's award for Best Outcomes, Mitigating Fraud in the AI Finance category.
"Globally, fraud is set to account for something like 4 to 5 percent of global GDP loss," Instnt founder and CEO Sunil Madhu told Newsweek. "If that fraud loss was a country, it'd be the third or fourth largest country in the world."
When he started his previous company, a platform for digital identity verification called Socure, Madhu saw a larger problem around how fraud was being managed in the financial industry and decided to start a new company to address that.
With the Instnt Fraud Loss Insurance Solution, the company helps customers detect fraud with AI-driven models.
"Instnt is the first company that has managed to make fraud insurable," he said. "We are an AI for fraud loss insurance, so we built a machine learning and artificial intelligence system that allows us to uniquely price risk and shift that risk off their balance sheets onto the insurance market."
By making fraud insurable, Madhu said these institutions can use insurance to offset losses, which improves their margins and allows them to grow faster because they aren't sacrificing growth to keep fraud under control.
Current fraud solutions aren't doing enough, Instnt said. The existing solutions that do detect fraud don't eliminate the financial liability for businesses and risk management and the fragmentation of risk management forces businesses to rely on multiple, disconnected tools for fraud detection, compliance and insurance coverage. Additionally, banks often limit customer approvals due to fraud concerns, reducing revenue potential.
"Our viewpoint is not so much that we have to try to stop fraud; our viewpoint is that no two types of fraud losses are created equal, and there's this difference in that paradigm where most fraud prevention tools would strive to stop the fraud binary, good or bad," Madhu said. "So we can make a more qualitative decision based on expected losses and that allows the businesses do some optimizations they weren't able to before in terms of how many customers they let in through the front door."
Instnt's solution integrates machine learning-driven risk assessment with access to insurance-backed financial protection, according to the application. This allows businesses to offload fraud loss liability while approving more legitimate customers.
The tool analyzes an organization's historical fraud patterns and creates a custom policy for fraud loss coverage. It can identify fraud signals in real time to prevent unauthorized transactions before they happen. If fraud does occur, businesses can file claims through Instant's platform and receive payouts within 30 days.
By allowing Instant to absorb the financial impact of fraud, banks can focus on growth, customer acquisition and financial resilience, Instnt said.
"One of the largest digital banks in the world. We can't name them because it's not public yet, but the one of the largest digital banks in the world is losing nearly $45 million in just one type of fraud loss, which is first-party fraud in the loan products that they provide to their customers. And we were able to show them that for $8 million they could take that $45 million of exposure off the books," Madhu said.
