The Growing Importance of A.I in Online Brokerage

The words Artificial Intelligence get thrown around a lot nowadays. Here at PandaTS, our focus is on developing narrow A.I that can perform certain business-critical functions more efficiently and to a higher standard than human agents. When we talk about A.I, we’re describing systems that have been designed to take certain burdens off the shoulders of your staff, allowing their talents to be used elsewhere.

Online Brokerages are Data Gold Mines
In our industry, you often hear people saying that today’s brokerages are essentially dealing desks attached to massive marketing machines. This may have been the case in decades gone by, and marketing is certainly one of (if not the) biggest expenditures of most brokerages. However, one of the things we’re constantly trying to communicate to our clients, is that the modern online brokerage is an abundant source of actionable data. Data that in the right hands can be harnessed to offer operational efficiencies unheard of just a few short years ago. As such, the brokerage of the future is just as likely to be a home for data scientists as for online marketers.

Of course, the two domains do overlap. The efficiencies of data science can certainly be used to improve a brokerage’s marketing endeavours. The online-only nature of most modern brokerages means that these businesses have the ability to build sophisticated conversion funnels that address incoming traffic in a highly targeted manner. But, in our opinion, this is just the tip of the iceberg.

A.I Document Verification
A recent example of the kinds of innovations we’re focused on at PandaTS, is our recent collaboration with Google’s Vision A.I team. Having identified document verification as a consistent pain point for our clients, we’ve been able to use the sophisticated Google Vision A.I algorithm to not only filter out the badly scanned KYC/AML documents that are a consistent drain on the human resources of most back office and compliance departments, but to also read these scanned copies, compare them against the data each client has supplied in the CRM, and then rank them accordingly.

This simple act of thinking outside of the box and having the technological know-how to pair existing technological advances with our knowledge of the online trading industry, has yielded a new document verification module that drastically increases the efficiency with which PandaTS clients handle incoming document submissions. You can read more about this development here.

Next Call A.I
Another breakthrough that we’re extremely proud of is our Next Call A.I system. Next Call A.I is another innovative CRM module from PandaTS that offers data-driven, proactive, customer support, sales and retention capabilities. By monitoring data from real time client activity, the system is able to calculate what issues your clients may require assistance with. It will then rank these issues by importance and provide your various teams with lists of high priority clients to get in touch with, along with a brief description of the trigger that created the alert in the first place.

Online brokerage is different to many other online businesses in that it’s exceedingly difficult to remove the human element altogether. With the amounts of money that are at stake for your clients, it’s crucial to have a human voice to provide guidance and reassurance. What we’ve achieved with Next Call A.I, is to marry the two worlds, allowing your human teams to be far more surgical in the manner in which they contact your clients. Rather than blindly cold calling lists of names and numbers, they can now target their attentions in a much more intelligent manner. This not only engenders a sense of trust and brand loyalty in your clients, it also makes the job of your call centre staff far more rewarding. You can find out more about Next Call A.I here.

The Money Maker
Unlike other online businesses that only have behaviour data from their front-facing online real estate to go by, online brokerages possess another extremely rich seam of underutilised client data. Trading behaviour.

An issue our clients consistently report is that the functionality of risk management systems that come bundled with most common trading platforms are extremely basic, forcing their dealing staff to essentially hedge/risk manage manually. While this may have been feasible a decade ago, the sheer volume of incoming trades and number of symbols/asset classes to keep on top of make this manual approach unfeasible today.

Aside from our popular dealing plugins, we’ve worked closely with individual clients to create automated strategies that handle risk management in a far more efficient manner. These include, but are not limited to: the real time monitoring of exposure across asset classes, the dynamic assignment of trades to different groups (A/B/C) on a per instrument or per client basis. We truly believe this A.I approach to order routing and trade management will be the bleeding edge of brokerage tech in the years to come.

Get in Touch
As always, our team of success managers are delighted to discuss any of the issues raised in this article with you. Please don’t hesitate to get in touch.