An Evaluation of Intelligent Agent Based Innovation in the Wholesale Financial Services Industry

Abstract

It is now widely accepted that success in providing wholesale financial services will depend on the industry's ability to develop flexible ebusiness models and strategies, as well as its ability to develop innovative systems for knowledge management and customer relationship management that can communicate effectively with legacy systems. In this paper we describe the problems and challenges facing Australian corporations in the Wholesale Financial Services sector and describe a research model which seeks to assess the impact of emerging Intelligent Agent enabled e-business initiatives, particularly in the area of system architecture and mass customisation. The purpose is to assist these firms achieve a level of international competitiveness in this area through (a) the investigation and longitudinal monitoring of the current status of and further developments in intelligent agent technologies, and (b) the investigation of emergent applications and successful approaches for the adoption and implementation of these key technologies in the provision of improved value-added customer services. We argue that a multi-disciplinary integration of e-business strategy, finance, intelligent agent architectures and knowledge technologies offer a previously unexplored solution to the documented challenges confronting Australia's Wholesale Financial Services industry. Agent architectures transcend traditional information system designs for applications that require complex, highly customized transactions in an open exception rich environment where responsiveness is imperative. We show that agent architectures naturally support e-business innovation by providing a framework for genuine dynamic information system development, which in turn leads to the kind of system agility that is crucial in the current highly competitive global financial environment. Agents can evolve over time iteratively and independently, without impacting other agents. A key difference between agent architectures and more traditional architectures is that instead of building relationships between software components at design time, agent architectures allow relationships to be formed on the fly at run-time. This results in highly responsive systems that are sensitive to the dynamic financial services context and that may be opportunistic in any competitive complex business environment. The ability to be opportunistic is particularly important in the current highly competitive global wholesale financial services industry.