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Agents for financial services and insurance

anthropic.com

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Re: Agents for financial services and insurance

#171

Post by rubyfan »

scottyah wrote: post #158
tencentshill wrote: post #34

I don't trust these AI-only companies to be overnight experts in properly handling medical, financial and insurance data. They have no business providing these tools, unless they want to take all the risk too.

I think a lot of people are misunderstanding the typical workload of people in Financial Services. They aren't using Claude to transfer money, they're just building a LOT of slideshows and fancy excel docs on made-up numbers to try to sell mergers and new financing options/types of loans. Most programmers would just consider this "sales".

That’s a gross over generalization. Some of the insurance data here suggests use of AI to make underwriting decisions. There are several states with regulations which could potentially pull these agent solutions into their regulatory oversight if used by the industry to effect insurance outcomes.

Re: Agents for financial services and insurance

#172

Post by bvan »

Havoc wrote: post #3

For those in the finance space, are you actually seeing any real AI tools being used? Like for actual operational tasks? I've really only seen it used for research / exploration thus far. Either for economic research slide deck or for exploring trading hypothesis

Yes, in very specific cases where I fully understand the methodology(ies) that is (are) applicable, and am able to verify correct implementation. Also, as an enhanced ‘Google search’ to supplement what I have found. I am the skeptical type… yet, so far have been impressed. But, I wouldn’t trust using AI to blindly give me solutions to a problem I couldn’t solve myself, albeit much more slowly.

Re: Agents for financial services and insurance

#173

Post by Terr_ »

scottyah wrote: post #158
tencentshill wrote: post #34

I don't trust these AI-only companies to be overnight experts in properly handling medical, financial and insurance data. They have no business providing these tools, unless they want to take all the risk too.

I think a lot of people are misunderstanding the typical workload of people in Financial Services. They aren't using Claude to transfer money, they're just building a LOT of slideshows and fancy excel docs on made-up numbers to try to sell mergers and new financing options/types of loans. Most programmers would just consider this "sales".

> They aren't using Claude to transfer money, they're just [...]

It might be lower stakes, but isn't that still a juicy target for data-exfiltration attacks?

In other words, imagine if one of your direct competitors was watching everything your employee read while making spreadsheets and slideshows.

Re: Agents for financial services and insurance

#174

Post by stubish »

bix6 wrote: post #165
BowBun wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work in a space where one could imagine a Claude replacing our product. I think someone stated it clearly - they can't take on these kinds of businesses until they build out the risk side and the personnel, all of which is a human problem not a tech one. A lot of processes still require physical steps and backstops because it's not possible to source all the data needed to act on it in the first place. Then you hav…

> they can't take on these kinds of businesses until they build out the risk side and the personnel, all of which is a human problem not a tech one. Yes they can? They have infinite more cash to pay off any risk. What do you need personnel for besides sign off if the AI does it right?

The personnel also need to take the fall when the AI does it wrong. A judge isn't going to jail Claude, they are going to jail the sucker who unknowingly authorized the fraud.

Will Anthropic externalize the risk, selling access to agents? Or will internalize the risk and liability, selling financial services? Maybe both? I guess lots of companies want both, doing some things internally and keeping other things at arms length by outsourcing to 3rd party accountants.

Re: Agents for financial services and insurance

#175

Post by Terr_ »

stubish wrote: post #170
tossandthrow wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would recommend you to not use these, if you are not willing to absorb the risk. Luckily there is still a significant market for the services.

Some human always gets to be the certified fall guy for non-compliance. Maybe the legal agent can help structure the company so that is an ignorant lower level accountant and not the CFO. Currently we don't know the risk, so it is kind of hard to absorb.

Decade-old spoilers for "How I Met Your Mother" ... but there's a character who has that kind of job, as a legal meat-shield.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8u62HptZ6TE

Re: Agents for financial services and insurance

#176

Post by stubish »

sholladay wrote: post #69
JamesSwift wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? It sounds exactly like the design I would hope for. It automates what I'm going to do already without needing to wait. And it allows you to bypass it entirely and just revert to the manual process (along with waiting).

That all sounds reasonable until you realize that the same logic is how we ended up with customer support systems that try to walk you through a phone tree and if you are lucky, you will be able to press 0 to speak to a human without answering a bunch of questions first and being referred to the online help articles. Do you enjoy using any of those systems? Do you want the world to be that way?

No, we end up with crappy systems because people are optimizing to save money over providing a good service. OP has simply replaced the traditional room full of clerks applying policy rigorously with a baysian algorithm and now AI. The management and oversight is still in place, and that is what makes a system that doesn't suck. To make it suck and save money, you remove access to that oversight or just remove it all together. And falling down that slippery slope is not inevitable, even if it sometimes seems like it is.

Re: Agents for financial services and insurance

#177

Post by scottyah »

Terr_ wrote: post #173
scottyah wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a lot of people are misunderstanding the typical workload of people in Financial Services. They aren't using Claude to transfer money, they're just building a LOT of slideshows and fancy excel docs on made-up numbers to try to sell mergers and new financing options/types of loans. Most programmers would just consider this "sales".

> They aren't using Claude to transfer money, they're just [...] It might be lower stakes, but isn't that still a juicy target for data-exfiltration attacks? In other words, imagine if one of your direct competitors was watching everything your employee read while making spreadsheets and slideshows.

Yes, corporate espionage may be alive and real but would claude on their microsoft/amazon/google cloud be different from documents on that same cloud?

Re: Agents for financial services and insurance

#178

Post by scottyah »

philipkglass wrote: post #156
scottyah wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slightly related, I used Opus 4.6 to help me make marketing copy and ideas for my app. It understood the vibe I was going for on my baby-naming app (elation at discovery, curiosity, shared experiences), while 4.7 instantly wanted to pit the couples against each other (really highlighting the he said/she said) and the marketing copy went from "find a name easier" to "Our new feature is great. You're welcome." I can't…

I tried Opus 4.7 for two days before I started beginning every session with "claude --model claude-opus-4-6". I assume that 4.6 will become unavailable at some point, but I hope not any time soon. 4.7 hit usage limits faster, didn't do anything obviously better, and had more annoying behaviors in other aspects. I don't know if this is strictly a model issue or if there are also problems with how it's harnessed throug…

Join me in a petition for them to opensource 4.6 as their first model! It'll be like gemma4 but good enough for all the coding we do.

Re: Agents for financial services and insurance

#179

Post by [deleted] »

stubish wrote: post #174
bix6 wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they can't take on these kinds of businesses until they build out the risk side and the personnel, all of which is a human problem not a tech one. Yes they can? They have infinite more cash to pay off any risk. What do you need personnel for besides sign off if the AI does it right?

The personnel also need to take the fall when the AI does it wrong. A judge isn't going to jail Claude, they are going to jail the sucker who unknowingly authorized the fraud. Will Anthropic externalize the risk, selling access to agents? Or will internalize the risk and liability, selling financial services? Maybe both? I guess lots of companies want both, doing some things internally and keeping other things at arm…

[deleted]

Re: Agents for financial services and insurance

#180

Post by scottyah »

order-matters wrote: post #167
scottyah wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "real humans" doing the tasks being replaced are overworked kids less than 2yrs out of college on an average of 4hrs of sleep at working at 3am. If the AI makes their jobs take half as much time I bet they're a lot more likely to catch errors (and live longer).

at risk of sounding facetious, how exactly do you catch an error in a sum without performing the sum yourself? How do you verify that all the tariffs are properly allocated to the correct GL code without going through the invoices and checking for each tariff on the list? How do you make sure none were accidentally assigned to other GL codes? All you have is pdfs, you dont know what the AI did or didnt do with the in…

It's like self-driving cars. You might want to accept human fault error rates until we prove overwhelmingly that the software is near-perfect, but others might want to switch to a system once it proves that it reliably beats most humans by a large factor, then work to mitigate the common errors it does have and improve.

When management signs off on work (SOX requires CEOs and CFOs to personally certify the accuracy of financial reports), they do not personally 'verify that all the tariffs are properly allocated to the correct GL code' or nearly any other hard numbers. The world works with human-level best effort, and management of that risk. I'm sure additional checks will be developed to categorize that risk, but the entire field of finance is about analyzing and pricing in risk so I think it'll work just fine.

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