Cloud spending in the financial services industry has been on a growth curve, and Amazon Web Services Inc. has gained momentum in this sector. For financial services companies, broader cloud adoption has led to a heightened focus on data and new ways to organize and manage vast amounts of information to create intelligent solutions using AI.
How the financial world is leveraging data to transform operations and increase customer value was a central focus of theCUBE’s coverage of the AWS Financial Services Symposium. TheCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, provided insights through interviews with company executives, customers and partners. (* Disclosure below.)
“We talked a lot about intelligence, and we talked about the definition of intelligence, which is to really be able to actually acquire knowledge and skills,” said Scott Mullins (pictured), general manager of financial services at AWS, in an interview during the event. “It’s all about how do I have the capabilities to actually get to intelligence as fast as possible? To do that, to actually leverage generative AI to get to intelligence, you’ve got to have your data organized in a way that makes it easy to do that.”
The rise of AI factories — accelerated compute platforms with purpose-built infrastructure — provides an opportunity for financial services firms to leverage generative AI and improve operational efficiency. One of the key companies behind the AI factory is Nvidia Corp.
“An AI factory is a combination of a completely new stack of systems,” said Malcolm deMayo, global vice president of the financial services industry at Nvidia, in a conversation with theCUBE. “It’s also leveraging open-source models, APIs or OpenAPIs. Then, finally, it’s having the stack in place. What Nvidia has done is we’ve built a complete full-stack platform to help financial services tackle this.”
For one prominent company in the insurance industry, the AI factory offers an opportunity to move a substantial portion of its operations to the cloud and incorporate advanced AI strategies.
“We have about $800 billion in life insurance in force,” said John Napoli, head of transformation, artificial intelligence and delivery at Guardian Life Insurance Co., during an appearance on theCUBE. “What’s good about Guardian is … they want to invest more … we want to make this organization a data and AI-driven company. The way we’re going about it is we’re building what I call an AI factory.”
Guardian Life has partnered with Vertical Relevance Inc., an AWS solutions provider, that worked with the insurance company to move 80% of its applications into the cloud. This laid the groundwork for Guardian’s development of the AI factory, according to Brian Jakovich, managing director of the AWS practice at Vertical Relevance, during his interview with theCUBE.
“As [companies] are getting more involved in let’s say generative AI and other areas, that’s where we’re helping and accelerating the efforts,” Jakovich said. “[It’s] how they can take certain parts of their business and then look to accelerate with generative AI, more so typically in marketing and sales efforts of how to basically generate revenue and then slowly moving into more customer-facing type of activities.”
Here’s theCUBE’s complete video interview with John Napoli and Brian Jakovich:
The Cloud Security Alliance has survey data showing that 98% of financial services organizations are now using some form of cloud computing, and 57% currently use multiple cloud providers for infrastructure as-a-service and platform as-a-service needs. Metrics such as these highlight an opportunity for these organizations to seek new solutions in the financial services field.
One of these solutions involves the use of vector search, a combining of transaction data and customer profiles into semantically related items that can rapidly identify anomalies and strengthen fraud protection.
“That’s where I think our Vector Search plays a significant role in that as you [carry out] transactions like a card payment, for example,” said Shiv Pullepu, principal of industry solutions financial services, U.S., at MongoDB Inc., during a discussion on theCUBE. “You can actually take the transaction information as one vector and also the customer profile as another vector and also anything around that customer, you can combine it and create these vectors and be able to find these different patterns and anomalies at the speed of light.”
Another technology attracting interest in the financial services community involves knowledge graphs or graph structured models that can operate on data and illustrate relationships between entities. Knowledge graphs can store networks of data and enable the use of generative AI to combat financial fraud.
“Knowledge graphs can really drive high levels of accuracy, deep explainability, context, reduce hallucinations, and that’s why a lot of leading service providers are recommending knowledge graphs as really an essential part of the generative AI stack,” said Bryan Evans, regional vice president of sales at Neo4j, in an interview on theCUBE. “Many companies are missing half the value of their data because they’re not able to track and keep records of relationships and patterns within data sets.”
At the end of April, AWS announced general availability of its Amazon Q generative AI assistant. As the financial services community moves more strongly into generative AI, Amazon Q can help build applications in AWS by allowing non-coders to create new features with conversational prompts.
“What it’s actually enabling people to do is offload more of the heavy lifting,” said AWS’ Mullins during his conversation on theCUBE. “Do you even need coding languages? Or do you need your developers to work with Q to say, ‘Hey, this is an application I need to build. Start building that for me Q and I’ll check in with you in about three hours to see if I like the direction you’re building in.’ That’s where we’re at today.”
Broader adoption of AI is poised to help ease the lack of skilled labor in data governance. Informatica Inc.’s CLAIRE GPT is emerging as a resourceful AI-driven data management tool for the financial services world and other industries.
“[We’re] leveraging large language models to basically do the work for the data professional,” said Peter Ku, vice president and chief industry strategist of banking, capital markets and financial services at Informatica, during an appearance on theCUBE. “Where in the past you’d have to learn how to use our technology, now with CLAIRE, we’re actually doing it for them. Democratizing data management … helps reduce the cost and the ownership while at the same time reducing the risk of not getting it right because of the investments that we’re making in AI.”
The movement of financial services companies toward AI adoption has led firms to think more closely about modernizing the tech stack while embracing the democratization of data services, according to Junta Nakai, vice president and global head of financial services, sustainability and cybersecurity go-to-market at Databricks Inc., in an interview on theCUBE.
“How are we going to democratize data and AI across the organization, and then how are we going to actually transform?” Nakai said. “This is what’s happening. And as a result of that at Databricks, financial services has become our single biggest vertical and one of the fastest growing verticals. If you asked me in 2019, ‘Is financial services going to be the largest vertical in the near future,’ I probably would’ve said no.”
To watch more of theCUBE’s coverage of the AWS Financial Services Symposium, here’s our complete event video playlist:
(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the AWS Financial Services Symposium. Neither AWS, the sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)
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