AI the 'big winner' as banks and fund managers dig deep on tech

Artificial intelligence will be the chief beneficiary of the financial services industry's pivot to new technologies in its bid to improve performance and cut costs in the coming years. Octavio Marenzi, chief executive of the consultancy Opimas, which this week published a report entitled Fintech Spending and Innovation in Capital Markets, said AI would be "be the big winner" as banks, brokers, fund managers and other firms poured money into new technologies and data sources. His comments come with some of the biggest names in finance, including Goldman Sachs, BlackRock and Deutsche Bank, already looking for cheaper and faster ways to transform business lines that have until now relied on a human touch. The report from Opimas found that AI would have the most potential to transform banks' sales and trading divisions and the way fund managers make investment decisions. Opimas wrote: "The capital markets industry is awash in massive amounts of data. How that data gets harnessed, analysed and used across the value chain will increasingly not be up to humans, but rather machines that, eventually, will operate faster, smarter, and with a razor-sharp predictive view of what's to come in the markets, from a trading, marketing and processing point of view."