Banking

I had the true honour of being invited by Prof. Ali Hirsa to present at this excellent workshop. The organizers review 1400 abstracts published during the year and select the ones that according to them reflect the most significant research at the intersection of ML and Finance. Our work with Kamesh Korangi and Christophe Mues, “A transformer-based model for default prediction in mid-cap corporate markets” [paper, ArXiV], was one of them!

Excellent roster of speakers, including people from MIT, Stanford, Blackrock, Morgan Stanley, and of course, the hosts Columbia and Bloomberg. Everything went amazing except that the IT team lost a few of my slides, but I think the audience did not mind very much. I look forward to keep engaged with such an excellent team moving forward. Here are a few pictures of the event.

Cristián on the stage before his presentation at the Alfred Lerner Hall

The presentation was at the amazing Alfred Lerner hall at Columbia University. 400 attendants from industry and academia were present.

The stage at the Alfred Lerner hall

Stock image of code of ethics

During 2022 I had the pleasure of participating on a series of workshops discussing the challenges in AI applied to financial institutions. I was part of a group of 30 professionals from industry and academia. The forum was organized by the Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions (OSFI), Canada’s prudential banking regulator. These discussions will inform the future regulation in the area that OSFI is targeting for release later in the year.

The report discusses the EDGE model for financial institutions: Ethics, Data, Governance, and Explainability. It aims to provide general guidelines to strike the right balance between regulation and innovation. I greatly enjoyed all discussions that led to this report, in my minor capacity as participant.

Give it a read in this link.

I was on the CBC panel again this weekend! This week we spoke about the BoC’s decision to keep the monetary policy rate steady, the Mercer report on Millennial renters needing 50% more upon retirement (not a fan of the study) and Amazon’s Bedrock & Titan, although my producer cut me off because we were running out of time. I had a lot more to say about AI!

What I didn’t say on Saturday: I believe we will end up in a three-tiered world: A first world of companies developing these models (having the technological capacities and data availability to properly train them). A second world of companies that can take outputs of these models, or available public models and fine-tune them over either private or public infrastructure (BloomberGPT for example and several research projects I am working on). And a third world of companies that will be technology takers and deploy these technologies either via live services (such as Amazon Bedrock) or via prepackaged assistants (such as LLM-powered Bing or Microsoft’s Copilot).

See the panel below.

Professor Cristián Bravo answered this important question in an interview with CTVNews.ca, for more information go to the following link.

Banking

9th Columbia – Bloomberg Machine Learning in Finance Workshop

OSFI Report – A Canadian Perspective on Responsible AI

CBC News Weekend Business Panel April 15, 2023

How likely are bank failures in Canada after SVB crash?

The Banking Analytics Lab