BNP Paribas Personal Finance UK Accelerates Commitment To Innovation And AI During Birmingham Tech Week

Leading consumer finance provider BNP Paribas Personal Finance UK welcomed 14 tech businesses with Artificial Intelligence (AI) expertise to its Connector Series event in collaboration with SuperTech — an organisation supporting tech innovation in the West Midlands.

Hosted at iCentrum Birmingham Innovation Campus during Birmingham Tech Week — the largest regional tech festival and conference promoting tech and digital — the tech companies engaged in a speed networking session with senior executives from BNP Paribas Personal Finance UK, providing consultancy on how the company can use AI to supercharge its transformation plans.

This involved rotating around seven stations including risk, marketing and customer experience, corporate, IT & data, operations & transformation and commercial.  

From a collaboration to support customers in real-time if they become vulnerable to a virtual assistant that can help customers improve their financial wellbeing, the session sparked some innovative conversations and solutions which BNP Paribas Personal Finance UK will reflect and act upon in the coming months.  

The companies in attendance included: Cardtrend UK, Credit Canary, Fuse by Pave, Inicio, LexVerify, Primacy, Quantum View, Voilo and others.

This event follows the success of BNP Paribas Personal Finance UK’s first programme with SuperTech where they implemented digital solutions to solve complex challenges around data visualisation, automated underwriting and chatbots in collaboration with fintechs. 

The two companies will be announcing the second phase of the programme in November.

Commenting on the Connector Series event, CEO at BNP Paribas Personal Finance UK, Stephen Hunt, said: “It has been a productive morning watching our teams interact with people who are at the cutting edge of AI technology. For us to remain a leader in personal finance, it’s important we open our minds and embrace new ideas to help us deliver better products, services and solutions for our customers and partners which is what this event is all about.  

“Engaging with the tech companies helps us to create an innovation mindset to solve real challenges we are facing as a business, and I look forward to building on from today’s event by teams as we explore how we can bring new ideas to help drive our transformation”. 

Hilary Smyth-Allen, Executive Lead at SuperTech, added: “SuperTech’s Connector Series is founded on convening high-value business encounters, but this event supercharged such activity by leveraging our distinct sector focus, combined with the platform of Birmingham Tech Week, for greater reach and more meaningful interactions. You can’t deny the power of face-to-face meetings for accelerating engagement with innovation and ultimately business opportunities for all parties. This is clearly something we are going to have to repeat!” 

Oscar Wilsby from Fuse By Pave said: “It has been an incredible experience attending this event and I have been very impressed by the breadth of teams from BNP Paribas Personal Finance UK we were exposed to. From chatting to people in data all the way to compliance, it has been an eye-opening experience discussing AI.”

Stephen Paterson and Kay Edwin from AND Digital added: “The event has been a great opportunity to sit down one-to-one with as many people as possible who are ambitious about using technology in their department of BNP Paribas Personal Finance UK and learn more about their current challenges. Overall, it was a brilliantly progressive event to have various people and companies under one roof discussing AI and the possibilities.”