The financial services sector is no stranger to data analytics, but subjective, gut-based decision-making is still the norm in some areas.
Take equity capital markets (ECM) bankers, who specialize in helping clients raise capital through initial public offerings (IPOs) and the like. Traditionally, ECM bankers have relied on relationships with investors and their expertise of the financial and industry landscape to identify investors who are most likely to participate in an upcoming deal. Bank of America is looking to turn that tradition on its head with the use of artificial intelligence (AI).
“When you look at financial services and the use of technology to advance financial services, not every line of business and every product is as contemporary as the other,” says Elif Bilgi Zapparoli, co-head of global capital markets at Bank of America Securities.
The consumer side of the business tends to be very contemporary, she says, because the user base is all on the cloud, the internet, or mobile. On the more corporate-focused side of the house, technology lags, often because clients themselves are on the lagging side of the technology curve.
“Even when you look at our parts of the business, markets is more advanced than banking because the markets clients, the buy side, have been ‘electronified’ for decades now,” Zapparoli says.