GLENDALE, Calif., April 19, 2018 /PRNewswire-iReach/ --
Anthony Jenkins, former CEO of
Barclays Bank, predicts that over the next 10 years, advances
in financial technology—especially in artificial intelligence
(AI)—could cause the number of people employed by the financial
services sector to decline by as much as 50%, providing the
industry with huge cost savings and enabling a much more
competitive atmosphere.1 "That's the vision," says James
D'Arezzo, CEO of Condusiv Technologies. "The reality is more
complicated. Unless banks deal with the performance issues that AI
will cause for ultra-large databases (typically run on Microsoft
SQL servers), they will not be able to take the money gained by
eliminating positions and spend it on the new services and products
they will need in order to stay competitive."
Looming technical issues notwithstanding, senior banking
executives increasingly agree on the inevitability of AI-based
services and an accompanying major reduction in industry workforce.
Former Deutsche Bank CEO, John
Cryan, predicted a "bonfire" of industry jobs as automation
takes hold across the sector, noting that increased processing
power, cloud storage and other developments make possible tasks
that had previously been seen as too complex for
automation.2 More recently, Vikram Pandit, who ran Citigroup during the
financial crisis from 2007 to 2012, said that developments in
artificial intelligence and robotics could reduce the need for
banking staff in support roles by as much as 30% over the next five
years.3
Industry observers note that there is significant demand for new
automated capabilities. Among the potential use cases for AI in
financial services are data-driven management decisions at lower
cost; automated customer support; fraud detection and claims
management; insurance management; automated virtual financial
assistants; predictive analysis in financial services; and wealth
management advisory services offered to lower-net-worth market
segments.4
D'Arezzo, whose company is the world leader in I/O reduction
software, notes that providing the IT capability to support this
wave of AI will not be a trivial matter. Financial industry CIOs
are already under pressure to provide timely responses to
increasingly complex requests for data analysis,5 and AI
applications—which are far more demanding in terms of both data
throughput speed and quality6—will vastly increase that
pressure.
Intensive hardware upgrades, often cited as a solution to this
problem, may often simply make matters worse. D'Arezzo cites as an
example a recent announcement that the Tokyo Institute of
Technology Global Scientific and Computing Center has begun the
development of a new supercomputer, the Tsubame 3.0, to meet the
demands of artificial intelligence and big data applications. The
Japanese Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry has committed to
investing $1.9 billion in the
project.7
"This machine is not on the market yet," says D'Arezzo, "and we
have no idea what it will cost when it becomes available. Existing
supercomputers, however, tend to weigh in at $50 million to
several hundred million, plus implementation and data transition
costs. For most financial institutions, this approach to the AI
challenge—throwing hardware at it—not only negates the
cost-reduction advantages AI has to offer, but is unnecessary. A
much better way for the industry to manage AI is to increase the
performance of its existing infrastructure, particularly SQL
databases, which could produce the same efficiencies at a small
fraction of the cost of new hardware."
About Condusiv® Technologies
Condusiv Technologies is the world leader in software-only
storage performance solutions for virtual and physical server
environments, enabling systems to process more data in less time
for faster application performance. Condusiv guarantees to solve
the toughest application performance challenges with
faster-than-new performance via V-locity® for virtual servers or
Diskeeper® for physical servers and PCs. With over 100 million
licenses sold, Condusiv solutions are used by 90% of the Fortune
1000 and almost three-quarters of the Forbes Global 100 to increase
business productivity and reduce data center costs while extending
the life of existing hardware. Condusiv Chief Executive Officer Jim
D'Arezzo has had a long and distinguished career in high
technology.
Condusiv was founded in 1981 by Craig
Jensen as Diskeeper Corporation. Jensen authored Diskeeper,
which became the best-selling defragmentation software of all time.
Over 37 years, he has taken the thought leadership in file
system management and caching and transformed it into enterprise
software. For more information, visit www.condusiv.com.
- Treanor, Jill, "Banking facing 'Uber moment', says former
Barclays boss," The Guardian, November 25, 2015.
- Fletcher, Gordon, and Kreps, David, "Banking sector will be
ground zero for job losses from AI and robotics," The
Conversation, September 12, 2017.
- Bach, Natasha, "The Former Head of Citigroup Says 30% of Bank
Jobs Will Be Gone in Five Years," FORTUNE,
September 13, 2017.
- "Potential Use Cases of Artificial Intelligence for FinTech,"
Maruti Techlabs, 2017.
- Laskowski, Nicole, "CIOs under pressure to generate revenue
through data monetization," searchcio.com.
- Krasadakis, George, "Data Quality in the Era of A.I.,"
Towards Data Science, September 21, 2017.
- Kite-Powell, Jennifer, "The New Supercomputer Will Help Meet
Demands Of Artificial Intelligence And Big Data," Forbes,
February 20, 2017.
Media Contact: Ash Richardson, JoTo PR, 727-777-4621,
mradmin@jotopr.com
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SOURCE Condusiv