Hi Malcolm. You’re VP of Global Financial Services at NVIDIA. Is where you are now anywhere close to your dream job when you were growing up?
What an interesting question! When I was very young I wanted to be an Air Force pilot. As life would have it, I’m now ‘piloting’ NVIDIA’s financial services group. I’m glad I ended up here, and I’m sure the younger me would have been just as proud seeing what NVIDIA is doing today.
If you could look back, what key piece of advice would you give your younger self going through education and your early career?
Read more biographies. Learn from the experiences of fascinating and world-changing individuals, like the Founding Fathers, Albert Einstein and Steve Jobs. Find mentors in real people who broke down barriers, weren't afraid to experiment and solved real-world problems.
You’ve only been at NVIDIA a short while, but how much has the company evolved in that time, and where are you headed for the future?
NVIDIA operates at the speed of light. Although we’re a large company, we have not lost our roots as a startup or as an innovator, so we continue to evolve on an almost weekly basis.
In terms of what we’ve achieved, NVIDIA has pioneered the development of a full-stack accelerated compute platform.
This platform has been embraced by the financial services industry to enhance the alpha generation of trading platforms and improve the productivity and operational efficiency of banking workflows.
The payments sector has utilised it to mitigate transaction fraud. Additionally, we’ve established the leading DGX Cloud reference architecture platform for training and inferencing AI.
This means that as we project into the future, NVIDIA is strategically positioned to play a pivotal role in the financial services industry's adoption of high-performance compute and AI to transform the business.
This improves client experiences by removing friction and personalising engagement, lifting employees from dull, tedious, tiresome tasks via automation to ideate and solve big problems, and leveraging AI to become more environmentally conscious.
The results of our 2024 State of AI in Financial Services survey indicate a significant uptick in AI adoption, poised to accelerate this year.
While organisations dedicated the previous year to experimentation and framework recalibration, the upcoming year signals a shift toward moving more workloads into production, enabling enterprises to efficiently leverage the unstructured data they collect every day.
Organisations are gearing up to provide truly personalised services to their clients, driven by the deeper understanding that high-performance compute and AI provide.
What key challenges do you face day-to-day, and how do you go about overcoming them?
One of our primary challenges revolves around dispelling the common misconception that NVIDIA is a chip company. Ironically, despite the widespread recognition of the NVIDIA brand, many still don’t understand exactly what we do.
In essence, NVIDIA is the engine of AI. Our accelerated compute platform is available everywhere; in cloud, on prem and in colo, and is helping to reshape every industry.
Our ongoing efforts are focused on fostering a deeper understanding among organisations regarding how we can help accelerate their adoption of AI.
And so we have built and continue to expand our platform ecosystem. Through our inception programme, we have tech-enabled over 16,000 startups and fintechs.
Look at our partnerships like ServiceNow where we are helping them accelerate AI adoption at the speed of light! Just this week we agreed with the CTO of a leading wealth management fintech company to help them train AI models to improve the service their wealth managers deliver.
Someone said that if 2023 was the year of AI hype, 2024 is the year of AI implementation. How important is it for financial institutions to best leverage AI today?
2024 is poised to be a transformative year for AI implementation, especially in the financial sector. AI will fundamentally change the way financial institutions run their business, and the firms that embrace innovation will leap forward.
There are three key value drivers for implementing AI in financial services. The first is enhancing productivity. Imagine a large financial institution with a vast team of software engineers.
Providing them with a generative AI co-pilot to support their coding efforts can lead to an exponential increase in productivity.
Another example would be in trading organisations, where using generative AI to analyse vast amounts of unstructured data can identify trading signals, enabling more effective risk management and ultimately resulting in higher profits.
The second value driver is operational efficiency. There are thousands of manual processes in the day-to-day running of a financial firm.
Financial firms typically grapple with numerous manual processes, such as sorting through extensive contracts and relying on skilled professionals to navigate paperwork. AI offers a solution by automating these manual tasks, allowing employees to allocate more time to higher-level work.
The third value driver is revenue generation, and an increase in productivity and operational efficiency as described above will translate to a healthier bottom line.
Embracing AI implementation in financial services promises a future marked by increased productivity, streamlined operations, and enhanced revenue-generating capabilities.
What is NVIDIA providing to support financial institutions with onboarding AI?
NVIDIA extends comprehensive support to financial institutions addressing key challenges in their journey toward AI integration. Foremost among these is the longstanding issue of data quality, a challenge that has persisted for decades.
The second is that while AI models have grown by an astonishing 3,600 times in size, computational capabilities have not kept pace. Consequently, the current IT resources and infrastructure of firms are ill-equipped to meet the demands of the burgeoning AI landscape.
Third is the challenge of finding and retaining talent. Organisations must invest heavily in their workforce and provide ample opportunities for upskilling.
Recognising the intricate interconnection of these challenges, NVIDIA has strategically built platforms to support financial institutions in addressing these concerns.
Our objective is to streamline the adoption of AI technology by simplifying the use of microservices, reducing configuration times from weeks to a mere few minutes.
Financial services firms with high-quality data training sets can use our tools for scanning, deduplication, compression of white space and bias elimination, resulting in a remarkable 10x advantage in training time. This not only enhances efficiency but also leads to substantial cost savings.
Furthermore, we actively collaborate with our customers, supporting them in prioritising and comprehending the key steps in their AI implementation journey.
Describe yourself in three words.
A trusted advisor.
What do you enjoy most about being part of NVIDIA and helping lead its financial services division?
I find the most enjoyable aspects of being part of NVIDIA in the collective energy, the Esprit de Corps, the collaboration and teamwork — all centred around addressing our customers' significant challenges.
It's genuinely inspiring, and I'm grateful to be a part of it.
Time to end with our customary fun question! If you were stuck on a desert island, what three people would you want to have with you and why? (Family and friends excluded)
If I were to find myself stranded on a desert island, my ideal companions would include a proficient farmer with a knack for cataloguing and nurturing natural food sources, a skilled fisherman to harvest the fruit of the sea and an experienced boat-builder to help get us safely home!
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