Gen AI holds huge promise
BENGALURU: Fidelity Investments India makes use of the latest technologies and works with training partners to enhance employees’ learning experience. In addition to providing access to multiple technology learning platforms, it has specialized cohort-based learning programmes aimed at addressing niche business needs.
In an interaction with TNIE, Vijai Kishan Radhakrishnan, Head—Personal Investing (India), and Regional Chair, Fidelity Investments India, explains the importance of tech and how the company’s much sought-after programme Data Science Bootcamp focuses on building key data science skills of the future.
“We came up with this data science boot camp because we felt that data science skills were important for two reasons. One was the amount of work in analytics was getting more. We needed more people to be aware of data. And the second is, even when you’re running a technology role, the ability to understand the value of data and how you should build applications such that you can derive value from the data that you generate was something we wanted people to understand,” he says.
Is Fidelity Investments making use of Gen AI to serve its customers? “There is a place for everything, and for Gen AI too. There is a lot of promise of this too in terms of using tech to create and generate content. While we do that, we play within the realms of the fact that we are managing somebody’s money. We are managing people’s money, their financial futures and things... We are running experiments, but not at the scale at which some others talk about. We are doing it in a manner that we can service our customers better, ensuring that they can get service right,” Radhakrishnan says.
He adds that there is a lot of processing and content generation that the company does internally. “If there are opportunities within where we see there are good experiments that can be run, they are being looked at. But the core of our business is money management. So that is still a very research centric function that we do,” he says.
How are clients actually benefiting? He says there’s a virtual assistant on its website, which is using some of the algorithms that have been built based on the kind of questions some of its customers ask.
“The virtual assistant is trying to address that. Now, there’s a line you don’t cross on that, too, because in the end—we’re a financial firm. You can’t go and make an advisory using a virtual assistant. It still has to be human-centred because you should be able to show the lineage of your de-accessioning and why you made that decision. Somebody can hold us liable to that. So, you play with what kind of questions you can address using technology, and what you cannot. We’re very clear on that and we have a good governance mechanism to handle that,” he explains.
Also, the Fidelity Center for Applied Technology (FCAT) is serving as a technology resource for Fidelity Investments. FCAT research and development teams evaluate and track important trends in technology, identifying those that will matter most to Fidelity over the next five years.
eVelocity is a specialized programme within FCAT India that seeks to engage with the Indian and Asian startup ecosystem, build a mutually beneficial network, bring outside-in perspectives to its associates, pursue research on the latest fintech trends and technologies, and explore potential collaboration opportunities with startups.