`Watson’ to help IBM, Citi offer solutions for finance industry

Supercomputer Watson has been busy after it matched wits with a couple of humans on the popular quiz show `Jeopardy' last year, with stints at Columbia, a recent foray into hunting patent trolls and now helping crunch numbers and more for the financial industry. IBM and Citigroup recently came out with plans to look at how America's favorite supercomputer could help with digital banking.

Under the agreement, Citi would assess the supercomputer's prowess in helping "analyse customer needs and process vast amounts of up-to-the-minute financial, economic, product and client data," in the hope of providing rapid, personalised banking solutions.

According to Bloomberg, Watson's financial assistance would be offered as a "cloud-based service" and would earn IBM a part of the revenue and savings it helped generate.

IBM expects Watson would help it generate billions in new revenue by 2015 and the technology giant has already sold Watson to health-care clients, helping WellPoint Inc and Seton Health Family analyse data to improve care.

According to IBM executives, Watson's skills -- understanding and processing natural language, consulting vast volumes of unstructured information, and accurately answering questions with humanlike cognition would fit the demands of the finance industry admirably.

Financial services was the next big one for IBM, according to Manoj Saxena, the man responsible for finding work for Watson. IBM is confident with some training, the quiz-show star that could read and understand 200 million pages in three seconds flat and make money for it by helping financial firms identify risks, rewards and customer requirements likely to be overlooked by human experts.