Business
The data behind AI’s success in the financial sector
Published
2 weeks agoon
By
admin
Or Lenchner, CEO at Bright Data
AI (Artificial Intelligence) has taken the world by storm. The OECD estimates that global spending on AI will double from $50 billion in 2020 to more than $110 billion in 2024. The financial sector is no different, AI is expected to drive competitive advantages for banks and investment firms. Whether it’s used to enhance the quality of services offered to customers, automate processes, reduce risks, or unlock new investment strategies, AI is transforming the world of finance.
The role of publicly available data
The adoption of AI systems by financial services was made possible due to advancements in public web data collection. AI-based tools rely on massive amounts of data to continuously learn from therefore the data itself must be up to date, otherwise, by the time the model is deployed it might no longer be relevant, and in finance, that could result in significant financial losses.
Additionally, the quality and diversity of the data used to train AI models plays a critical role in their performance and accuracy. Especially in the financial world, an AI tasked with generating insights for financial decisions can’t be trusted if the data it was trained on wasn’t diverse enough.
This is where public web data comes in. The internet is the world’s largest up-to-date database, and that data is invaluable to the insights AI models provide. AI that feeds off public web data will have a competitive advantage, so long as the publicly available data collected is verified and cleaned to ensure it contains only relevant and accurate data.

Or Lenchner
AI tools can have many applications in the financial sector, for example, the detection of fraudulent activity. As the Federal Trade Commission reported fraudulent activity cost consumers $8.8 billion in 2022. An AI trained on outdated data will not be able to learn from the latest scams, and will not be trusted to detect such activity.
Ethical data and alternative sources
As companies realise the importance of publicly available data for their AI-based tools, collecting that data is a time-consuming, costly and tedious endeavor. For that reason, most companies turn to public web data providers, to help them save time and money. Not only do they collect the data but they structure, clean and synthesise the public datasets for immediate use.
In most cases, companies directly purchase pre-collected datasets for high volumes of public web data to train their AI models. Pre-collected datasets are cost-effective, instant and can be frequently updated. Through outsourcing their public web data operation, many financial institutions have realised that insights can be drawn from different sources. AI models can be trained to better analyse customers by assessing their social media sentiment, the impact of the climate crisis or price changes on consumer habits. Sometimes, the insights generated from alternative data can be applied to entire populations in a shared location.
It goes without saying that the public available data used to train AI models should be collected in an ethical manner. The US Securities and Exchange Commission constantly targets financial institutions tied to unethical conduct, which could lead to significant monetary losses. For that reason, financial institutions must ensure that the public web data providers they work with are transparent in their operations and compliant with the law.
While financial institutions are racing to adopt AI tools in their daily operations, we have only scratched the surface of what they are capable of. AI-assisted tools will undoubtedly be an integral part of the future of finance, but advancements in public web data collection are no less decisive. The quantity and quality of public data will determine the success of AI tools, but we must ensure it is collected ethically.
Business
How to identify the signs that your IT department need restructuring
Published
2 days agoon
March 29, 2023By
editorial
Eric Lefebvre, Chief Technology Officer at Sovos
For firms to execute transformations and meet their overall vision, it is crucial that their CIOs are able to recognise the signs that their department is in need of some internal change. In the current economic climate, CIOs working to fulfil their organisation’s priorities and meet business goals might hesitate to acknowledge that their IT department needs restructuring, never mind be able to identify the signs.
However, these problems rarely fix themselves and organisational restructuring requires conviction and determination from leadership for it to occur successfully. So, what are some of the key signs that CIOs should look out for?

Eric Lefebvre
Struggling to keep up with industry demands
CIOs unsurprisingly are working in an extremely demanding environment at the moment. Meeting these evolving demands is crucial for companies. When demands are not met and not handled properly, this can have a lasting impact on organisational goals and objectives, and even impact the way in which transformations are put into effect.
Depending on the organisation’s structure, the way in which being unable to keep up with demands manifests itself can differ. Despite double digit reductions across the industry, the search for talent across the tech world continues, project costs continue to rise as the cost of labour has increased and schedules have been disrupted by significant attrition. Many companies will also find business costs, such as that of third-party software, are higher than planned and technology debt continues to pile up faster than it can be sunset.
Whilst leadership teams might dedicate their department’s attention on the factors discussed above, they may find that their team will fall short when it comes to timely deliverables and helping maintain your organisation’s tech stack and guide its business transformations. Looking beyond the immediate problems of high costs and considering an internal reshuffle may be the solution for many IT departments.
Internal conflict within the team
Organisational designs with underlying issues can cause constant friction, especially when they go unacknowledged. An IT department that lives in conflict will certainly be reflected in results and less than successful tech transformations. CIOs will find that by adopting an organisational design which works through staffing issues, will better innovate, especially if they can all work together.
Department leads should have a strong understanding of their team’s work environment and guide them through any long-term or potential problems. When an individual is working in a demanding or complex industry, working well with your team shouldn’t be the main impediment to innovation. By acting quickly to eliminate internal conflict, CIOs can better lead and ensure their team’s focus is entirely on producing more optimal outcomes.
Delays are commonplace
When a large amount of your team’s time is spent setting objectives, budgets and timelines for the projects they are working on, it is vital that they are met. When delays are coming from the IT department, they will inevitably hinder the development of any business transformation, especially if it prompts teams to spend excessive amounts of time rearranging budgets and timelines and therefore hindering innovation.
IT departments are a crucial aspect in many different parts of a company’s transformations, so remaining on track when it comes to timelines and innovation is critical to operational plans. If delays have become commonplace in an IT team, and external factors are impacting projects, CIOs should look at restructuring an IT department to solve these issues.
The strongest team relationships do not happen by accident and are the result of good planning, strong leadership and a motivated team. CIOs can ensure this by providing vision and long-term strategy with clear goals and objectives to produce high levels of quality output.
When internal issues are noticed in an IT department, and are noticeably impacting team morale or productivity, this should indicate the need for departmental restructuring. Be that due to an inability to meet market demands, issues with productivity and meeting deadlines or internal conflict, these issues all risk a department’s functionality and an organisation’s ability to achieve its goals. In short, don’t overlook the warning signs!
Banking
Top banking trends of 2023 and global outlook of banking and fintech for the year ahead
Published
3 days agoon
March 28, 2023By
editorial
Author: Professor Marco Mongiello, Pro Vice-Chancellor, The University of Law Business School
You’d be forgiven for assuming that the global outlook for banking and fintech will be dominated by the usual suspects:
Artificial Intelligence – AI plays an increasingly prominent role in banking and fintech by enabling personalised services, fraud detection, predictive analytics, use of chatbots and robo-advisors.
Blockchain and Cryptocurrency – the secure, decentralised and swift system for financial transactions that blockchain has brought to the fore a few years ago, is now becoming ubiquitous. An increasing number of transactions are recorded through blockchains technology, primarily in the cryptocurrency market.
Digital Banking and fintech – accelerated by COVID-19 pandemic, the adoption of digital banking is a trend that will persist as customers have become accustomed to the convenience and efficiency of digital banking. Moreover, fintech enables access to financial services for previously underserved populations in developing countries or less affluent social groups in more affluent societies. This includes mobile banking services, peer-to-peer lending platforms, and microfinance solutions.
Open Banking – another global trend is the use of open APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) that allow third-party developers to build apps to facilitate customers’ access to financial data and services from banks.
Nonetheless, the challenges posed by these rapid changes are reminders that banking, an industry that by its very nature needs to be conservative, risk averse and solid, wobbles on the unchartered grounds of fast and turbulent innovation, where entrepreneurship instead thrives. The underlying rationales of banking and fast digital innovation are not incompatible but do need solid operations and thought-through decision-making to avoid causing catastrophic collapses.
The recent examples of Silicon Valley Bank, Silvergate, FTX and Wirecard are stark reminders that digital entrepreneurship applied to banking doesn’t just bring to customers the visible transformation of valuable new services, but also dents (perhaps as an unexpected consequence) the rationale itself of the role of banks in the global economy. Moreover, the central banks’ ability to contain the effects of single banks’ defaults is no longer a certainty, as experienced just over a decade ago and more recently. The markets’ sentiments are hardly reassured by the commitments of even the most coveted players, such as the European Central Bank, the Federal Reserve, and the President of the United States himself.
Regulators are lagging behind and their attempts to catch up may cause further seismic shocks to the global banking system. For example, another trend that is emerging is one of artificial intelligence decision-centres (i.e., decentralised offices of banks which take autonomous decisions on behalf of investors) outside the most stringent regulatory environments, enabling banks to operate globally more efficiently and more competitively. And we can expect that regulators will close the gap either abruptly, as it is currently happening in China, where private banks are subject to an escalation of regulatory and monitoring restrictions, or more gradually as it is happening in Europe and in the US.
The questions we face, as individual or trade customers of our high street banks, as direct investors or clients of managed funds, are whether banking will become more user-friendly yet, for our daily use but riskier, too, or is it simply becoming more efficient, transparent and also safer.
I’m afraid that the answer is by no means an obvious one. Therefore, caution, level-headed decision- making and critical thinking have never been as important as these days. Whether you are looking after your family savings or growing your pension reserve, the imperative is that you keep updated about the providers of the financial services you rely upon as well as about the general regulations that apply to your financial transactions. This is where, for example, you need to be familiar with your rights in case of cyber fraud, as well as learning how to minimise the risk of becoming a victim thereof. Also, taking additional steps to evaluate the credibility, solidity and reliability of the online provider of that app that was recommended by a trusted friend, may prove a very good move.
Similarly, whether you are the CFO of a medium or large company, or are a sole trader wrestling with your own business’s finances, you need to reflect on what you really want from your bank in the first place. That is before you started to be swayed by the whirlpool of offers of ‘opportunities’ to multiply your financial investments. Chances are that your initial approach to your bank was dictated by either a need for financing your working capital, as per your budget and strategic plans, or to find a safe place for your temporarily idle liquidity. Perhaps you were also after some basic treasury services such as swift payments and debt collection. Maybe some other financial services closely related to your business operations, e.g. factoring. The advice is to give very careful consideration to services that are more remote from your business, because the trend for the next years is that more and more of those will be offered to you. But many new services will disappoint those who, sadly, cannot afford financial mishaps as they look to run and grow their business.
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