Machine Learning and predictive analytics in Financial Services

Machine Learning is the latest craze in both the start-up and business world, with pitch decks and strategy presentations full of terms like ML and AI. To identify Financial Services companies that employ machine learning - and the topics they use it for - we have analyzed[1] data on Kaggle, an open innovation platform that intermediates "machine learning competitions". If you haven't come across Kaggle yet: Kaggle is an open platform with 750,000 registered data scientists. Companies and universities upload (anonymized) data and ask data scientists to offer predictions (e.g., "based on our customer data, predict who will go to hospital, and for how long"). The best researcher(s) are rewarded with prize money (and/or jobs), with companies paying as much as $3m for the most predictive model.