Amazon Web Services (AWS) has become a critical technology provider for Wall Street, and the company is now deeply involved in helping financial institutions leverage generative AI. With the rise of generative AI, the competition among cloud providers like AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud has intensified. To maintain its position, Amazon is investing heavily in its cloud and AI offerings, with a substantial portion dedicated to enhancing AWS and its AI capabilities.
John Kain, head of financial services market development at AWS, shared insights on how the company is working with major players in the financial sector. AWS is partnering with two international banks, a hedge fund, and a fintech firm to advance their AI initiatives. According to Kain, the industry is maturing, leading to more tailored AI applications. A major focus is reducing hallucinations, a common issue in generative AI where incorrect information is presented as fact. AWS is using tools like Bedrock Guardrails and automated reasoning to improve the accuracy of AI outputs.
JPMorgan Chase
JPMorgan Chase has significantly embraced the cloud, beginning in 2017. Having over a thousand applications running on AWS that fully take advantage of generative AI technologies. The bank’s internal data and AI platform utilizes AWS SageMaker, a tool for building and training machine-learning models, with thousands of employees using the cloud-based tool monthly. Security, governance, and compliance have been key considerations for JPMorgan. Because JPMorgan processes a massive amount of payments daily and serves tens of millions of customers, its scale provides valuable insights for AWS, assisting in its roadmap development, according to Kain.
Bridgewater
Bridgewater’s AIA Labs, or Artificial Investment Associate, aims to transform the firm’s investment strategies using AI and machine learning. Initially, generative AI was used to answer straightforward questions, but it has evolved. The platform now analyzes complex investing strategies by breaking them down into multiple steps, with each step handled by a specific agent. This allows the AI to check how interest rates impact returns, double-check financials, and summarize risk profiles. According to Aaron Linsky, CTO of AIA Labs, limiting the responsibilities of each agent has been crucial for success and is speeding up the process for investment associates.
MUFG
Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group (MUFG) is leveraging generative AI to enhance its corporate sales efforts. An AI platform that suggests sales ideas has significantly improved conversion rates. MUFG’s salespeople previously had to sift through vast amounts of documents. Now, the AI platform combines multiple data sets to get insights from the client’s transactions, previous sales conversions, financial filings, and public information. This reduces sales pitch drafting time from hours or days to minutes, according to Tetsuo Horigane, head of quant innovation at MUFG.
Rocket Mortgage
Rocket Mortgage is using AI in its call centers to transform strategy and customer experience. By integrating AWS technology, the fintech aims to create an “entire network of agents” to handle tasks such as transcription, real-time information gathering, and post-call insights. This saves call center employees significant time, allowing clients to self-serve a higher percentage of the time. With access to petabytes of data, the company is using AI to ask key business questions to improve its online platforms, streamline workflows, and enhance customer experience, according to Kain.
