Introducing Human-Centered Foresight

October 28, 2021

Foresight is increasingly becoming a well-respected and valued methodology for strategic planning by organizations and business leaders globally. As a still developing field, where can the power of foresight take us? And how can we adapt it to be more human-centric? Our foresight strategist, Miranda Mantey, walks us through how ATB Ventures plans to keep exploring and inventing meaningful methodology behind what Human-Centered Foresight can do.

Alberta tech startup is combating climate change and social inequality one purchase at a time

December 8, 2020

Who is going to make the changes we so desperately need to ensure the longevity of a cleaner and safer world? Can anyone enact real change and make a positive difference on an individual level? Or are climate change and social inequality really so vast that it’s going to take the world’s largest players to make any sort of difference?

A time for reinvention : How crisis spurs innovation

December 1, 2020

COVID-19 has forever changed our lives, but the world is finding ways to thrive in the face of adversity.

Putting the customer first by putting them at the center of everything we do.

November 17, 2020

Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) is a model for managing digital identities in which an individual has sole ownership and oversight over how, when and with whom their personal data is being shared. Users who subscribe to this model are able to hold and store all of their information directly on their own device and share for verification without the need of a central aggregator of data (i.e Equifax) - which tend to be highly vulnerable to theft and attack.

Each time you interact with an organization to access services or pay for goods, a large amount of personal information is shared with a variety of agents (for example driver's license, Social Insurance Numbers, emails, etc). Not only is this a cumbersome process for you, but the more information you share the greater the risk is for the security of your data.

Quick time-to-value data science: Delivering something functioning now over something perfect later

October 6, 2020

At a large organization in an established industry, there will always be“organizational inertia”: that is to say, it’s hard to adapt and respond to new threats (or opportunities) when the organization is busy staying focused on its day-to-day operations and delivering on expectations. The adage “if it’s not broken, don’t fix it” often reigns supreme. Change is hard, and staying focused is key – especially when people’s finances, businesses, and homes are at stake. In recent years, however, the banking industry in Canada hit an inflection point. The processing power of cloud computers has finally reached a critical point where it is now cheaper to rent secure space on a server, rather than buy and house data stores on-premise. Not to mention the data loss risk reduction provided by redundancy systems in cloud storage.

Practical data synthesis

September 1, 2020

In order to build and maintain customer trust, financial institutions are investing millions of dollars in preserving privacy while experimenting with exponential technology to bring best value to their customers. With rapid advancements in artificial intelligence on all fronts, however, there is a dire need in the financial sector to balance customer privacy with the use of transaction data in training robust machine models. This white paper provides a rationale focused on data privacy and also includes suggested algorithmic recipes related to how transaction data could completely eradicate the use of real customer data. A distinction is drawn between data simulation and synthesis. Two discussed synthesis techniques include a bootstrapping framework featuring dynamic time warping and a hidden Markov model fitted with a stochastic gradient version of the Markov chain Monte Carlo method.