RBC powers up its AI with new partnerships

By Fiona Collie | July 24, 2020 | Last updated on July 24, 2020
2 min read
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Toronto-based Royal Bank of Canada is bringing some added muscle to its artificial intelligence (AI) cloud-computing platform through new partnerships.

RBC and its AI research centre, Borealis AI, have partnered with Raleigh, N.C-based Red Hat Inc. and Santa Clara, Calif.-based NVIDIA Corp.

“Modern AI cannot exist without access to high performance computing,” said Foteini Agrafioti, chief science officer, RBC, and head of Borealis AI, in a release. “This collaboration means that we can conduct research at scale, and deploy machine learning applications in production with improved efficiency and speed to market.”

Red Hat is an enterprise, open-source software company, while NVIDIA Corp. is a technology company that designs graphic processing units (GPU) for gaming and other professional markets. GPUs are specially designed circuits meant to increase how quickly an image appears on a device screen, such as a smartphone or tablet.

Borealis AI is a research centre that’s backed by RBC. Its research is focused on responsible AI, natural language process and reinforcement learning — all of which is meant to help change the way individuals manage their finances.

RBC currently has a number of AI models in use across its businesses.

For example, Borealis AI has created natural language processing systems “that can analyze news articles in real time and assess their importance to RBC’s financial analysts and advisors given the industries and markets they follow,” said Agrafioti, in an emailed statement to Investment Executive.

The research team is also developing models for risk analysis and client service for RBC’s personal banking business.

Plus, through the use of a GPU, Borealis AI has created trade execution algorithms used by RBC’s Capital Markets division.

Said Agrafioti: “AI has the potential to model complex market decisions and increase accuracy in trade execution while adapting to changing conditions.”

Fiona Collie