Commenting on the appointment, Insignia Financial CEO Scott Hartley said: “I’m excited to welcome Damien to the Insignia Financial executive team, in his first executive role.

“With more than 25 years’ experience within IT and financial services, including 17 years with Insignia Financial (formerly IOOF), Damien brings to this role a deep understanding of the technology and financial services industries and will be an integral part of the execution of our FY2030 Strategy.

“Most recently Damien served as the General Manager, Wrap Technology and Operations where he led the build out of our proprietary technology and the operational teams supporting Insignia’s Wrap business.

“Damien’s appointment is a testament to the calibre of people we have within Insignia Financial, and our commitment to fostering and developing leaders across the business to support our ambition to be the leading and most efficient wealth management company by 2030.

“I would also like to acknowledge and thank Frank Lombardo, who has been acting in the Chief Technology Officer role, for his outstanding contribution to our business for nearly a decade. While acting in the role over the last six months, he’s overseen the completion of our NAB separation and supported the transition to our new operating model.”

Damien commenced in role on 6 January 2025.

The post Insignia Financial appoints Chief Technology Officer appeared first on AdviserVoice.

Professor Rajesh Vasa

Deakin researchers have partnered with financial services provider IOOF to apply artificial intelligence (AI) to the company’s in-house client administrative system – making processing times up to 400 times faster.

The project, led by Deakin University’s Applied Artificial Intelligence Institute (A²I²), aims to streamline the handling of hundreds of email queries received by IOOF business centres each day.

Head of Translational Research and Development at A²I² Professor Rajesh Vasa said the new system would analyse incoming correspondence and assign each item to a work category where support teams were waiting to process the item and provide a customer response.

“Work requests come in from many different sources, including email, phone and text message, and staff have the task of manually identifying these for appropriate actioning,” Professor Vasa said.

“The volume of requests and the repetitive nature of the work makes this an ideal job for a machine, but it is critical that the machine can read and understand the content and context of each work request.

“In this project we apply natural language processing (NLP) techniques while retaining and empowering customer service staff to do their jobs better,” Professor Vasa said.

IOOF’s Head of Platform Technology and Architecture, Damien O’Donnell, said his company was undergoing major changes to improve its customer focus and was continuously looking for opportunities where technology could help with those challenges.

“This is a significant game-changer for IOOF and we’ve been fortunate to have the opportunity to leverage Deakin’s world class knowledge and expertise,” Mr O’Donnell said.

“Manual work classification of incoming correspondence by a person takes, on average, two minutes per item.

“The AI solution takes around 300 milliseconds per item – so it can perform 400 classifications in that same period.

“Critically, the accuracy rate is more than 90 per cent across some of our highest volume demands,” Mr O’Donnell said.

Professor Vasa said IOOF was one of the few organisations in Australia that had the state of the art engineering capabilities to effectively integrate and deploy cutting-edge AI components.

“IOOF had much of the underlying infrastructure in place that enabled us to rapidly identify, refine and test the solution,” he said.

The post Deakin researchers use AI to speed up IOOF customer processes appeared first on AdviserVoice.