Financial services company MSCI has announced an expansion of its partnership with Google Cloud to accelerate the development of generative AI (gen AI) solutions for the investment industry.
Powered by Google Cloud’s gen AI platform Vertex AI and climate technology, including BigQuery Geospatial and Earth Engine, the solutions will help MSCI clients better manage portfolio risks and opportunities and make informed investment decisions.
A spokesperson for MSCI told FinanceAsia the strategic alliance was launched on January 25, 2023 and that the expansion was ‘an evolution’ of the company’s commitment to improving the client experience through technology and innovation.
“MSCI’s culture has long been underpinned by technology, which is the engine to delivering our research, data, and analytical capabilities,” the spokesperson told FA.
The spokesperson said that beyond the company’s work with Google, MSCI is continuing to identify opportunities to enhance its data collection and aggregation and deploy AI in its corporate functions to increase efficiency.
“We have been using AI and natural-language processing for a decade now to enhance our content. Given our deep expertise in modelling and data analysis, this is second nature to MSCI.”
Key focus
MSCI said partnership would focus on three key areas: risk signals; conversational AI; climate generative AI.
- Risk signals: MSCI aims to combine its proprietary data and analytics with Google Cloud’s gen AI solutions to provide an overview of portfolio and enterprise level risk designed to significantly reduce the time clients need to analyse and arrive at actionable insights. This solution “will help portfolio and risk managers more easily synthesise and rapidly act on significant volumes of risk signals from their portfolios, while also fostering greater collaboration between risk and portfolio management teams to build more resilient portfolios”.
- Conversational AI: This capability aims to use natural language processing to simulate human language and generate responses that can enable clients to quickly answer questions and surface information about their portfolios and MSCI data, models, and solutions.
- Climate generative AI: MSCI and Google Cloud aim to work together to leverage Google’s gen AI technologies to help investors measure and manage portfolio exposure to climate risk and identify low carbon investment opportunities. With these advanced AI technologies, MSCI says it will make it easier for investors to identify, synthesise, and communicate the broad range of climate exposures across asset classes.
“The AI revolution has led to rising expectations among companies and investors, who want faster access to higher-quality data, analytics, and actionable insights,” Henry Fernandez, chairman and chief executive officer, MSCI, said in a press release.
“Expanding our partnership with Google Cloud will help MSCI address these needs while keeping us at the forefront of advanced data technologies. It will also help us provide new solutions for investors working to decarbonise their portfolios.”
"The investment industry has long been fuelled by AI and machine learning, which MSCI has been using for years. However, advancement in generative AI has jump-started a revolution in our industry," added Jigar Thakkar, chief technology officer, MSCI.
Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian welcomed the expansion of the partnership, saying generative AI was driving the next evolution of financial services,
“Our partnership with MSCI to build generative AI- powered solutions will not only help risk and portfolio management teams better collaborate and unlock insights, but also will enable MSCI’s clients to build more climate-resilient portfolios,” Kurian said in the release.
