News & Stories

Sovrin is a blockchain network that works by acting as the “middle man” between facts—they accept facts about people or places, as well as the verification from another authorized party that those facts are true and trustworthy. For example, in the future, when we all have digital identity records, you could add your new driver’s license to your records through Sovrin, and the Government of Alberta could verify that it is, in fact, a real and valid license. From there, you could use your identity record anywhere you need to present ID with the simple scan of a QR code.

Think of all the places your identity is currently stored. Rather than 10-20 different organizations having their own version of your identity, you could go through life with one consistent record, that you completely control, granting other parties access to it when necessary—to open a bank account, get a car loan or be approved for your first mortgage. This is the future ATB is exploring, with the help of blockchain technology. And our starting point is, of course, making banking work for you.

Advancements in robotic process automation are enabling companies to quickly introduce improvements to outdated, complex, or error-ridden processes. But it’s not as simple as setting a bot loose and seeing massive returns in time and money saved.

As ATB Financial (ATB) increases its investment in Artificial Intelligence (AI) via operations and products, it is committed to translating ATB values and principles into the decision-making processes and optimizations of AI. AI presents considerable opportunities to better serve customers, but it also encompasses particularly intricate challenges to value-based decision-making because it introduces complexity, uncertainty, and scale. These features mean that harm is more challenging to evaluate and pre-empt, and that even the smallest decision may have a large long-term effect that is difficult to detect and fix. We are investing in the opportunity AI presents to enhance customer experiences. The intent with this work is to build our capacities to: identify, assess, mitigate, and monitor the ethical dimensions in AI uptake - ensuring ATB leads by example in the ethical deployment of emerging technology.

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.

Strategic foresight and scenario planning is the discipline of uncovering and analyzing the nuances of potential future outcomes in order to better equip businesses to recognize and adapt to unprecedented change. The scenarios outline the impacts of key uncertainties and they help scenario participants confront their personal blindspots in how they believe the path ahead will be laid out.