Operations Using AI Need Transparency & Supervision

SmartStream Online

“A.I. cannot work in a black box,” says Nick Smith at SmartStream Technologies, in this FTF Exchange podcast. “It needs to be able to provide transparency …”
Managed services clients and prospects of SmartStream Technologies are showing lots of interest in A.I.-based technologies and how they can impact securities operations, but there is a caveat to that evolving demand for A.I., says Nick Smith, executive vice president, managed services, SmartStream Technologies, in this latest edition of the FTF Exchange podcast series.

“A.I. cannot work in a black box and nobody knows what it’s doing,” Smith says via the podcast. “It needs to be able to provide transparency to both the senior managers and the risk managers, and the regulators exactly what activity the A.I.’s been performing and what was the logic used for developing those activities. That’s where we start looking at supervised and unsupervised A.I.”

In fact, the transparency will show how SmartStream has incorporated what it learned five years ago when the securities operations provider began “working with Tier 1 banks, household name banks, and partnering with them, in terms of understanding their use cases, and the challenges that they face and also having access to their data,” Smith explains. “That enabled us to invest and develop the tools that we have today … What we’re really doing is providing the agile tools for an evolving demand that we’re seeing.”

In the FTF News Technology Innovation Awards competition for this year, SmartStream Managed Services won Best Outsourcing Provider, and SmartStream Air won Best Cutting-Edge Solution.

During the podcast, Smith also covers:

• How A.I. and machine learning are major concerns in the capital markets industry now;
• How machine learning is impacting the managed services offerings from SmartStream;
• The role that A.I. and machine learning play in the SmartStream Air offering;
• How A.I. and machine learning can be applied to the burden of securities data reconciliation; and
• The security concerns about A.I. among managed services clients.