Mitsubishi UFJ Trust and Banking Corporation case study

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For a small team trusted with a critical part of a bank's business, experimenting with emerging technology that could change everything - but which carries risks of failure - may sound bold. Yet this was the response to the hype around generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) from Ahmed Uppal, Head of Internal Audit for London Branch of Mitsubishi UFJ Trust and Banking Corporation (MUTB).

A key objective for Ahmed’s team is to be “tech forward” in all they do and he was very keen for them to be early adopters of GenAI when they began their journey in 2023. He understood GenAI's potential to transform the delivery, and value, of the insights his team generates - insights that help the bank's management understand and assess potential risks and ensure and demonstrate compliance.

Ahmed says: “The most important thing is to create a safe environment for your team to experiment and innovate. That sense of curiosity and innovation will carry your teams forward much further into your future.” To this end, Ahmed has led through change over the last year, working with PwC on GenAI pilots.

New directions for analysis

Ahmed’s team usually analyses large amounts of information and data using traditional techniques - for example, using Excel for data analytics coupled with extensive substantive testing. Ahmed explains: “GenAI offered a different solution, which is to feed the information to the tool and then ask focused and targeted questions and see the outcome of it.” This new approach can accelerate processes and pave the way for better insights.

Conducting audits can involve weeks of hands-on work and research. Ahmed’s team reviews lengthy policy and procedure documents, investment trade data and more, for the answers they need. Time doesn't allow the team to examine all of the data types and formats available, so they usually examine a select sample. But in one case, using GenAI tools, Ahmed’s team was able to test 100% of a sample in a matter of weeks - a job that would otherwise take months for relatively less assurance.

Better informed insights

To compare the difference between traditional Excel-based methods and tech powered GenAI solutions, Ahmed and his team conducted side-by-side auditing tests with PwC using both techniques. They found GenAI was able to assess large amounts of data significantly faster. More promising was the tool's ability to produce unexpected insights that opened up new directions for the team's analysis.

“It presents an opportunity to challenge the knowledge that you have,” Ahmed says. “There were instances where the outcomes led us to ask different questions, which we would not have asked otherwise.” The test results, he adds, show GenAI can help audit teams look at much more data, much more efficiently - freeing up time to use their knowledge and judgement to produce better insights and make more informed recommendations.

Ahmed says early, promising results have inspired his team to think about other ways GenAI could benefit the bank - possibly by helping with risk assessments, planning and continuous monitoring for changing business conditions. They’re excited by the possibilities, and Ahmed is proud of their enthusiasm in embracing the potential of GenAI. He says: “The most important thing we did was to see this as an investment. Creating a safe environment for a team to explore and innovate is critical to succeeding in the use of this technology.”

^{The contributions by Ahmed Uppal in this article and video are his personal views only and therefore do not necessarily represent the views of Mitsubishi UFJ Trust and Banking Corporation (MUTB). MUTB is not responsible for the content or any decisions made based on such information.}

Karl Saunt
Internal audit has been trying to embrace digital transformation for the last decade at least.

Ahmed Uppal
So one of our key objectives for the team is that we want to become tech-forward in the way we do all our audit activities.

Karl Saunt
We're finding with generative AI it’s a fantastic way to leapfrog ahead on that digital transformation journey. It's also creating the efficiency in internal audit delivery that we probably haven't seen as much with other technologies.

Ahmed Uppal
Being tech-forward means that we want the ability to harness information within the business and the data as effectively as possible.

Karl Saunt
So we met with Ahmed, and we demonstrated some of the capability that we’d developed around generative AI, and I think it's fair to say he was quite excited about the potential very early on.

Ahmed Uppal
We thought, right, we could pilot this into some of our audits which require an assessment of large data and information much more efficiently and effectively compared to traditional audit methodology.

Karl Saunt
With Ahmed and his team we took a very agile and iterative approach to building out the solution. We were pretty much every other day showing updates, getting feedback on it and using that to really refine the solution.

Ahmed Uppal
The main problem we were trying to resolve is that we want to analyse large amounts of information and data, both structured and unstructured, as effectively and efficiently as possible.

GenAI offered a different solution, which is to feed information to the tool and then ask focused and targeted questions and see the outcome of it.

Karl Saunt
You have to identify the right use case to begin with. It has to be an area that is probably currently quite painful to deliver, or quite manual to deliver.

Ahmed Uppal
The information given to the team is immense. The team expends a considerable amount of effort and harnesses its knowledge and expertise of the business to come to the right outcomes. But the GenAI offers an alternative solution to look at much more data, much more efficiently, which means you can harness much more intellectual capital from the information that is out there to generate better insights.

Karl Saunt
It very much compliments auditors and their teams. It's not replacing what they're doing, it's complementing them and allowing them to focus on speaking with stakeholders, applying judgement, applying context, those human-only activities, rather than spending lots of time stuck in the weeds of spreadsheets doing data manipulation and data wrangling.

Ahmed Uppal
It is quite important to ensure that the team that is using GenAI has the right skills and knowledge to challenge its outcomes. This is where the expertise and the knowledge and the skill of our team kicked in as well.

Karl Saunt
It's important not to treat this as a big project with a reveal at the end. It's something where you need to deliver value as you go and show the output so you can refine it and continue to understand, is it helping in the way we expected it to do?

Ahmed Uppal
The GenAI led to some interesting insights and outcomes, and in some cases we challenged the GenAI and in other cases GenAI challenged the way we do things.

So I think the most important thing is to ensure that you create a safe environment for your teams to experiment and innovate. I think that sense of curiosity and innovation will carry your teams forward much further into their future.

Karl Saunt
Getting your team behind this is key to success. Seeing is believing and I'm confident that when the teams believe that this is going to make their life easier, they will be the ones that come up with the ideas for the new use cases and where to take this next, because they know the organisation better than anyone.

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