The Impacts and Challenges of Artificial Intelligence in Finance

Until recently, large financial institutions could fend off competition thanks to the scale of their operations and their information advantage. They could run expensive datacenters and hire large research teams. It was impossible for startups to compete. Nowadays, data scientists fresh from MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) or Harvard can literally launch a fund using advanced machine-learning algorithms by leveraging cloud-computing services. Information is still money, but information is now more and more distributed, accessible and exploitable by small actors.