Eugene Grygo, Chief Content Editor, FTF News
We are hearing a great deal about how artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning and robotics — applied individually or via combinations — are going to take over the world, eliminating securities industry jobs and maybe even entire professions.
Yet I suspect (my Luddite impulses aside) that disruptive technologies may yield services that we hadn’t anticipated and that might become a permanent part of the landscape for financial services.
One such candidate is the Alexa cloud-based voice service from Amazon, which combines many disruptive technologies. It has emerged as a consumer service for playing songs, turning on and off lights in a “smart home,” gathering information, news, weather, and so on via voice commands.
“Alexa lives in the cloud so it’s always getting smarter, and updates are delivered automatically,” according to Amazon’s propaganda. “The more you talk to Alexa, the more it adapts to your speech patterns, vocabulary, and personal preferences. Alexa comes included with Echo and other Alexa devices.”
Put simply, Alexa is a “virtual assistant” created via Amazon Lab126, that gives users the ability to “control several smart devices.” End-users can add capabilities from a growing list of third-party providers. In fact, Amazon has such high hopes for Alexa that it has approximately 5,000 employee/elves working on new ways to expand the offering.
Echo device image via Amazon
For the moment, more and more people are using Alexa for mundane tasks such as “ordering a pizza from Domino’s, requesting a ride from Uber, tracking your fitness with Fitbit, controlling your TV with DISH Hopper, ordering flowers from 1-800-Flowers, and more,” Amazon points out. Alexa is also making itself more available via mobile apps.
With Amazon adding services and extensions so quickly to Alexa, it’s encouraging Google to get into the business with its own virtual assistant offering.
For JPMorgan, though, Alexa’s services represent another kind of opportunity.
Alexa’s capabilities are being applied to the investment research available via the firm’s Corporate and Investment Bank (CIB) division, bank officials say. Investment banking clients can now use Alexa to access research via voice commands.
“Owners of the Echo family of products can enable the JPMorgan skill on Alexa,” according to a release from the bank. “If clients subscribe to the firm’s research, they can log in and request Alexa to email them information such as a stock’s tear sheet or the latest research from a specific analyst,” bank officials say.
“This partnership seamlessly empowers our clients to access JPMorgan research whenever and however they choose, making it more accessible, providing a new digital platform for our research,” says Joyce Chang, global head of JPMorgan Research, in a prepared statement.
It’s not a huge leap to assume that other financial services firms will also be jumping on the Alexa cloud (or similar service from Google and others), especially for support that can be easily handled by this kind of service. It makes a great deal of sense and doesn’t result in any job losses. It might actually spawn more jobs.
For now, JPMorgan customers will need some kind of Echo device and client access to JPMorgan Markets, officials say. The link to set it up via Amazon is here.
Of course, implementing technology is never as easy as dreaming about it.
“Alexa, what is the future?”
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