AI And Machine Learning Are The New Future Technology Trends

Bhaktvatsal Sharma Mar 23, 2018

With increasing pace of technological trends in the capital markets industry, NSE (National Stock Exchange) hosted the Future Tech Conference 2018 in Mumbai. Representatives from small, medium and large companies got together to discuss the latest technological trends in the Indian capital markets.

Robotic hedge funds allocating assets, Robo-advisors guiding investments, bots taking over customer interactions and so much more are all in today’s tech armoury. While the technology has been around for a while, it is only today that enormous increases in computing power and data are finally enabling real use cases. Capital markets have always been a step ahead of the world in adopting disruptive technologies like this.

At the conference Vikram Limaye, MD & CEO, NSE gave the opening address at the conference. He stated some important factors of the capital market and the transformation of technologies over the years.

“Machine Learning has been the fodder of science fiction for decades, and the underlying research has found applications in the financial sector from its earliest days decades ago. Capital markets have long used computers and computer models to try and predict the movements of markets or detect patterns of fraud. However, it was always the human that did the thinking, the tuning and tinkering and the computer that faithfully and tirelessly executed the models and crunched the numbers. What has changed today is the ability of computers to learn from repetition, to use past data to improve - without human aid - the output over time. Perhaps the best-known, an early application was in 1959, when Arthur Samuel, an IBM scientist, published a solution to the game of checkers. For the first time, a computer could play checkers against a human and win. This is now also possible with the board game “Go,” which has been around for 2,500 years and is purported to be more complicated and strategic than Chess. Twenty years ago, it was widely believed that a computer could never defeat a human in a game of “Go.” This belief was shattered in 2016, when AlphaGo, a computer program, took down an 18-time world champion in a best-of-seven match. Deterministic technologies that mimic human behaviors are being superseded by intelligent systems that not only perform at or beyond human capacity but evolve and develop new capabilities like people too. Instead of perpetuating a dependence on programmed responses, and all the limitations and complexity that entails, we’re teaching systems how to learn. This is a quantum jump in what computers can do, since the significant bottleneck in harnessing information technology is the difficulty of programming the instructions needed to make a machine perform a task. The underlying science is both remarkable and beyond the scope of this talk. But it is not too difficult to understand that the recent advancements in AI are shaping how the capital markets are evolving.” Said Vikram Limaye

According to Vikram, Machine Learning is playing a very big role in the capital markets across the world and now India can see the new wave of automation. The values of machine learning in the year 2018 include identifying market patterns, cognitive automation, enhanced judgments and enhanced interaction with the consumers.

Sankarson Banerjee, CTO, NSE at the conference too provided some insights about NSE’s initiatives. According to him the purpose of hosting future tech conferences is to create awareness in the industry for all companies regarding the latest technological trends in the capital markets and bring programmers along with investors on a single platform.

“We are now planning to have more conferences on the future technology because the pace of technology has picked up in today’s times. The road of future tech has always been to pick up a topic and make it a discussion within the capital markets. Two years ago we did blockchain and at that time the capital market was largely talking about the blockchain technology. This year we are hoping to take few more such sessions and we have realized the need for such sessions primarily because the big guys always have access to the latest technological trends but it is the smaller guys though they may be smart but need the exposure. Hence we do these conferences where we are very keen on making sure that the market understands what is possible. The other reason why we host such conferences is also to encourage the technologies including the providers and call them to India and work with us to execute the use cases. To create awareness across the entire ecosystem and make sure that the providers also work with us.”