DEV Community: Khushnood Asif

How Artificial Intelligence Is Transforming Banking

Khushnood Asif — Fri, 18 Feb 2022 20:24:32 +0000

In recent years, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning have received much press, but the potential is obscured by fear and uncertainty among the general public and financial services executives alike.

In spite of the financial industry's long history of embracing new technology to serve its customers better and improve efficiency, it has been slower than other sectors in implementing AI solutions such as retail and healthcare.

As part of this presentation, I will discuss several compelling use cases for AI and why banks and credit unions must embrace cognitive technologies to transform the way they engage and serve customers.

Why AI?

Artificial intelligence refers to technology that performs functions normally performed by humans (specifically, by people acting intelligently). The ecosystem has a wide variety of categories.
From a study in 2018, it was indicated that 32% of financial services firms were implementing AI technologies, including predictive analytics, recommendation engines, and voice recognition. Those that did not adopt AI faced challenges such as fear of failure and regulatory compliance. According to the research survey, only 12% had not used AI because they felt it was too new and untested and so were unsure about its security.
Artificial Intelligence and machine learning will be applied creatively in the financial services sector as part of the next frontier of automation. A number of financial technology (FinTech) firms have introduced time-saving features such as optical character recognition (OCR) for reading tax returns and other financial documents, which eliminates the need for humans to enter data into the system manually. AI-based applications like this are simple and reduce errors associated with manual data entry as well as save workers hours of rework each week.
From research a broad range of industries will use cognitive systems to drive worldwide revenues from $62.35 billion in 2020 to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 40.2% from 2021 to 2028. Banking is one of the top two industries that will lead this growth.

Current Challenges & Solutions

Since financial institutions generate enormous amounts of data every day, it is likely that they lack a consistent data governance program. Large banks, especially those that have grown through mergers and acquisitions (which is most banks), often have their customer data spread over multiple incompatible back-office systems.
The problem can be approached in a variety of ways. Teradata, for example, has developed methods of accessing data in legacy systems and allowing it to be analysed. The company claims that data scientists can now spend 90 percent less time collecting data and more time analysing it.
In collaboration with Facebook, Teradata has developed an open-source project called Presto, a SQL query engine optimised for interactive analysis and petabyte scale. In contrast to previous methods, Presto allows firms to query data wherever it resides, whether it is Hive, Cassandra, relational databases or exclusive data stores.
Presto can process data from multiple sources, making it possible for a organisation to conduct analytics across all its data sources.

Benefits of AI

Some financial services firms are using AI despite the challenges, as the technology offers a variety of benefits.

Enhancing customer engagement: The importance of high-quality, personalised communications has never been greater in the financial services industry, which is increasingly focused on improving customer experiences. AI can help automate and scale this process.

Online wealth management services like ‘robo advisors’ offer automated, algorithm-based portfolio management advice without involving a human counterpart. These firms collect information from online users and then create an appropriate portfolio using low-cost ETFS and passive index funds from companies like Vanguard. It is possible for algorithms to rebalance portfolios regularly in order to maintain investment guidelines at costs less than 100 basis points, while advisors typically charge 2 to 3 percent annually plus trading commissions.

Others benefits include:

Achieving productivity gains with automation
Accelerating Fraud Detection and Minimizing Risk
Helping consumers spend more wisely
The future of interactions

In the financial services industry, AI is still in its infancy, but it will increasingly become important for organisations to stay competitive and innovate.

Artificial intelligence can improve communications with customers and staff, analyse data from multiple disparate locations to find patterns or connections that humans couldn't find, and answer investment questions in real-time via natural language. It's not too late to begin learning about AI technologies and strategising for the future-better late than never.

Design by Khushnood Asif

How to Terminate a Node Process

Khushnood Asif — Tue, 01 Feb 2022 18:10:43 +0000

You might find yourself managing multiple node processes at the same time while working on a full-stack application. Automated scripts or programs that watch and execute your unit-tests while you code/TDD are possibilities. There is likely Webpack running and serving your frontend on localhost and a node app serving the REST API your frontend is connecting to. Each of these processes would occupy a specific port.

I currently host my React App on localhost:3000 and run my backend on localhost:3001 via serverless offline.

In most cases, you would start those processes from the command line like this:

npm run react-scripts start or sls offline start --port 3001

If you run those, you can quickly end them with:

Ctrl + C

There has been no issue until now. Occasionally, though, you start a process, and then close the IDE or Terminal, and the process continues to run. When you attempt to restart the process, however, you receive an error saying that the port is busy.

The reason or how this happens is that every now and then (weeks or months) I find myself looking up commands that I don't use very often (and that I can google in under 20 seconds), without knowing why or how I did it. Hence, I'll put it here, it might be useful to others as well.

Thanks to an npm package, kill-port, I got exactly what I needed with a much more user-friendly interface. The npx package is already installed, so I don't need to do anything. All I need to do is:

npx kill-port 3000

That's all! Because npx has to temporarily install the kill-port package, it is slower than kill + lsof. However, I can tell you its 100x better. Based on my review of kill-port's source code, it is built on kill + lsof. In my opinion, kill-port provides a more approachable abstraction.

If for some reason you need to install kill-port npm package, you can use the following command:

npm i kill-port

Python Program to check Prime Number

Khushnood Asif — Tue, 30 Nov 2021 16:52:36 +0000

The program we will be creating will determine whether a number is a prime number or not. In this case, we will ask the user for a number he wishes to check for prime number.

Explanation

We'll loop and divide the number with all the numbers less than that number except 1. If any number divides it completely without leaving a remainder, then it is not a prime number, and if it cannot be divided, then it is a prime number.

Source Code

n= int(input("Enter a number "))
for x in range(2,n):
    if n%x==0:
        break
if x+1==n:
    print (n,"is a prime number")
else:
    print (n,"is not a prime number")

Output

Enter a number 1523
1523 is a prime number

How to Reset Password in Kali Linux 2021

Khushnood Asif — Mon, 01 Nov 2021 19:15:17 +0000

Kali Linux is the most popular security operating system of today, and it is the operating system that most programmers use for penetration testing. Pen-testing is a practice in which people check their own systems and their own architectures for vulnerabilities. Debian-based, it is widely regarded as one of the best options for hackers. Kali Linux was developed by offensive security as a rewrite of Backtrack, a Linux distribution focused on security. Kali Linux is a distribution with many hacking and penetration tools that are current and are included as part of the distribution by default.

Kali Linux requires a minimum of 20GB of storage space and 1GB of RAM for its installation and operation. The operating system uses a number of tools that require graphics hardware acceleration.

Reset Root Password

If you have forgotten your Kali Linux system password all you need to do is follow the steps below.

Restart the system
Enter the GRUB menu and cancel the timeout with any key on the keyboard. So, the system won't boot into Kali.
Select the 'Advanced options for Kali GNU/Linux' option and press 'E' on the keyboard.
Go to the line with 'linux' on the command line. Replace 'o' with 'w' in the Linux line so that it becomes 'rw_single'. At the very end of this line, hit the space bar on your keyboard and type 'init=/bin/bash'.
Save the changes by pressing Fn + F10.
Enter 'passwd' into the command emulator and press Enter.
Enter your new password next to the 'New Password' option and press Enter. Once you have retyped your new password, you will see the message 'password updated successfully'.
You can now return to the login screen and log back into your Kali Linux System.

Create a QR Code with Python

Khushnood Asif — Fri, 10 Sep 2021 10:57:44 +0000

It is first necessary to install the pyqrcode module. You can execute this command by writing it in your command prompt or terminal.

pip install pyqrcode

It will take a few seconds to install the module.
We need to create a Python file from which we will generate a QR code.

1) Import essential modules.

import pyqrcode from pyqrcode import QRCode

2) Create the string that will represent the QR Code.

s = "https://khushnoodasif.com"

3) The following commands will generate the QR code.

qr = pyqrcode.create(s)

4) The QR code is generated and stored in a 'qr' variable. The svg file can now be created and saved as "website.svg".

qr.svg("website.svg",scale = 7)

Now that we have the code finished, we can run the program. The program creates a .svg file named "website.svg" in the directory where the python file is located. When you open the file, you'll see a QR code (see the QR code image below). Scan it and you will see the string 's' that points to my website.

QR Code

I have posted this python file's source code on my GitHub repository. Also, check the walk-through on YouTube.

Thanks for reading!