Societe Generale's markets activities place AI at the heart of their transformation
Against a backdrop of rapid changes in the financial ecosystem, Societe Generale's Market Activities have begun the transformation of their businesses by integrating Artificial Intelligence into their organizational processes and work tools.
At the heart of the digital transformation of our economies, our societies and the environment, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is part of our daily lives: public transport traffic, airline ticket reservations, intelligent cars, medical diagnostic assistance systems, client relations, GPS services, supply chain management, facial recognition. The list goes on and on. Built on a set of algorithms and techniques that enable machines to simulate intelligence, reproduce human gestures or mental activities, AI is at the heart of many recent innovation breakthroughs.
Gathered in the framework of AIforFinance, a 100% digital event organized by Startup Inside and La Place Fintech on September 10, 2020, the European AI and financial industry ecosystems will provide feedback on AI technology and its future applications through online round tables. Banks, insurers, financial services companies, investors and Fintechs shared their success stories in terms of transformation, and client experience, and exchanged ideas. Placing AI at the heart of the digital transformation of its retail banking businesses, Societe Generale is actively participating in the debates with the intervention, in the day’s first panel, of Philippe Aymeric, the Group's Deputy Chief Executive Officer in charge of French Retail Banking and its Innovation, Technology & IT department and International Retail Banking activities.
Against a backdrop of rapid changes in the financial ecosystem, Societe Generale's Market Activities have also begun the transformation of their businesses by integrating AI into their organizational processes and work tools. They have done so notably thanks to their ability to collaborate with the Fintech ecosystem through the Global Markets Incubator (GMI), Societe Generale's incubator dedicated to Fintechs specializing in market activities that was launched at the end of 2018. The incubated companies benefit from Societe Generale's recognized expertise through close links with market operators, sales teams, financial engineers and other experts, as well as direct access to one of the largest trading rooms in continental Europe. Drawn to all Fintechs that aim to co-construct high-performance offers, the GMI particularly favors those that stand out the most through their degree of innovation and their ability to increase the quality of services offered to clients.
Since its launch two years ago, GMI has made AI one of its priorities by selecting three Fintechs with expertise in this field from among the ten or so companies incubated: Nephelai and SuccessData, both selected in GMI's 2019 class; and AlgoReady, chosen to be part of the 2020 class. The incubator gave them access to all the Societe Generale expertise needed to help them transform their ideas into innovative products and disruptive solutions for traditional markets businesses or related services.
Nephelai is a Fintech company specialized in the application of Machine Learning algorithms to improve financial transaction recording processes – in particular through automatic filling and real-time error detection. Saving time for traders, this solution helps to reduce input processing costs. Also based on Machine Learning, SuccessData's IA solution converts data from various documents that cannot be processed by traditional platforms and software (reports, regulatory files, web pages...) into machine-readable data. This allows to automate the extraction of text in a structured way. AlgoReady uses AI in its solutions that aim to understand investor behavior, profile and strategy, and then generate opportunities by anticipating their requests to buy or sell shares.
The successful incubation of SuccessData and Nephelai has led Societe Generale to enter into commercial agreements with both fintechs to benefit from the added value of their AI solutions.
The performance and innovative nature of Nephelai's transaction auto-filling solution led Societe Generale to deploy it in its business. “The solution allows to reliably fill in all the fields of a complex financial transaction with a minimum of information, without the need to build and maintain a heavy static ruleset”, explains Farouk Smati, head of a team of loan traders at Societe Generale. This improves the entire processing chain by making the modelling of operations more reliable, thereby saving time spent on validating them and managing their life cycle".
These collaborations with the Fintech ecosystem demonstrate the role played by AI as a tool for transforming not only the Bank's market activities, but also related activities throughout the value chain.