With banks under massive pressure to slash costs associated with the production of research on stocks and bonds in Europe, it's artificial intelligence (AI) to the rescue, with Germany's $525-billion Commerzbank leading the way with a new content-automation partnership. For Germany's second-largest bank, it's a major expenditure on research, with a partner, Retresco, that hopes to help it churn out AI-generated research reports and replace the human element in analyst notes. The AI product hasn't been fine-tuned yet, but investors will be interested to learn that it's already advanced enough to provide around 75 percent of what a human equity analyst would give an investor when writing an immediate report on quarterly earnings. Presumably, AI is more objective, too--and that's where the idea of investor protection comes into play. But equity reports reviewing quarterly earnings, says Michael Spitz, Commerzbank's head of research, have common reporting standards, so the parameters are easy to plug in to AI, the Financial Times reported.

US software giant Mozilla and Germany's Commerzbank have both said they will pull advertising from Facebook over the Cambridge Analytica affair. The social network has been under fire all week over revelations that the political consultancy harvested private data from the Facebook profiles of 50m Americans and handed it on to the Donald Trump campaign for use in the micro-targeting of swing voters during the 2016 US presidential election. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has since apologised and volunteered to testify before Congress, conceding: "We made mistakes". Chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg said the site would be "open to regulation" as it seeks to rebuild public trust over the handling of users' information and accusations that Russian bots were engaged in the spread of "fake news" and misinformation across its pages in a bid to sway the race for the White House. Writing in a blog post, Mozilla CEO Denelle Dixon said the company was "pressing pause" on its Facebook advertising.