The TRADE 55 | Page 27

[ C O V E R S T O R Y | M I L E S K U M A R E S A N ] “Everything that we are doing now is to create tools; where they already exist we will use them, but if they don’t exist then we will create specialist tools for the traders.” AI in trading still remains a somewhat slippery entity; while there are some impressive AI systems out there, Kumaresan says that much of this is simply “what used to be called statistics a couple of years ago.” Having spent the greater part of his academic years studying computer sciences and having attained a Master of Phi- losophy degree in AI and Robotics, Kumaresan doesn’t impress easily when it comes to the AI label that can often be erroneously applied in the FinTech space. “Having built AI for a long time in other contexts my view is that the majority of the technology with the AI sticker is mere snake oil,” he says. “Therefore, I am a little hesitant in using the word AI.” And he says that having AI re- place humans for trading is “abso- lutely not” likely in the foreseeable future: “AI can beat chess grand masters because chess has clear states, structure and rules. Trading, on the other hand, requires com- plex higher level decision making based on vast amounts of mostly noisy and ambiguous information. Therefore, I expect execution to remain an inalienable prerogative of human traders for a long time to come,” he says. Nordea also has models to nor- malise trade slippage, to convert raw slippage data into a form that is comparable across met- Issue 55 // TheTradeNews.com // 27