Intelligent CIO Europe Issue 05 | Page 25

LATEST INTELLIGENCE Technological advances in finance have gone into overdrive in recent years, with many aspects of banking, payments and key operations almost unrecognisable from 20 years ago. With all this new technology comes new opportunity, but also new challenges. Adopting new technologies has never run completely smoothly. Just look at the slow uptake of contactless payments; now it is commonplace and moving from card to phone and even sunglasses with an NFC- enabled chip by Visa (Business Insider). The next big advances in finance will come from machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI). Banks are deploying AI for managing risk, combatting fraud, devising investment portfolios and placing trades (House of Bots). We should soon see it mature into a core function of many organisations, helping to create significant strategic advantages ranging through efficiency breakthroughs to service differentiation advantages and insights. Protecting your reputation with the use of machines is key to long-term growth. UBS’s risk management platform requires enormous computing power to run millions of calculations daily on-demand. Cloudera helped them move to Microsoft Azure cloud which sped up calculations by 100% and saved 40% in infrastructure costs. Head of Technology Services, Paul McEwen, commented: “Increasing the agility and scalability of our technology infrastructure is crucial to the bank’s strategy.” (Finextra). n Download whitepapers free from www.intelligentcio.com/me/whitepapers/ www.intelligentcio.com INTELLIGENTCIO 25