The FinTech Year in Stories: December

By Louis Thompsett

January 05, 2025

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We look at the articles that made the news in fintech in 2024. Today, it is December…

Money20/20: Oracle & NVIDIA Partners Drive Fintech Surge

The convergence of Oracle's cloud infrastructure and NVIDIA's accelerated computing platform is enabling a new wave of financial innovation, with startups leveraging both platforms to deliver unprecedented processing power and AI capabilities.

This technological marriage has become particularly crucial as financial institutions grapple with exponentially growing data volumes and increasingly complex regulatory requirements.

SQream exemplifies this symbiotic relationship through its 14-year partnership with NVIDIA, which has evolved to embrace Oracle's AI-centric cloud environment.

“Using SQream on NVIDIA is like having the HOV lane open up with no one on it – you just zoom right past,” explains Deborah Leff, SVP Data Science & ML at SQream.

This acceleration in data processing capabilities is optimised on Oracle's cloud platform (OCI), which Deborah describes as “the most efficient, effective way to break through bottlenecks and create tremendous value from structured data”.

SQream has leveraged NVIDIA and Oracle’s capabilities to pioneer an innovative approach to address critical market needs in financial services.

This includes improving the accuracy of fraud detection systems to better protect organisations’ customers and merchants, removing latency related to processing month-end closes (which improves business insights for executives), and enhancing customer service by providing dramatically faster time to relevant insights.

Securing Financial Data in the AI Era

The collaborative approach extends to compliance and security solutions, where Securiti harnesses NVIDIA NIM™ while operating within Oracle's secure infrastructure.

Jack Berkowitz, Chief Data Officer at Securiti, describes how its platform integrates “over 450 connectors to different systems” while ensuring data protection and proper permissions – a crucial capability for financial institutions processing sensitive information.

This infrastructure partnership has proven particularly valuable for companies like Hummingbird, which serves both innovative fintechs and established financial institutions.

“Having partnerships like this makes it easier for a startup like us to bridge the gap and support some of the most complex companies in the world,” notes Matthew Van Buskirk, Co-founder and CEO of Hummingbird, highlighting how Oracle and NVIDIA's combined capabilities enable them to meet clients' diverse operational requirements.

Hummingbird positions itself as an AI enablement company, addressing a critical challenge in the financial sector: the lack of well-labelled, clean training data. By addressing this issue, Hummingbird helps organisations best position themselves to enhance their AML financing investigations.

How Klarna's AI Revolution Saves Millions Annually

At the forefront of industry transformation, Klarna’s CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski has embraced AI to automate essential functions like customer service and internal operations. This strategic move is not just about technology advancement but also about significant financial savings and operational excellence.

Advanced AI Integration in Marketing

The buy now, pay later (BNPL) leader reports saving US$10m each year from employing Gen AI in its marketing department alone. By reducing its sales and marketing budget by 11%, with 37% of these savings directly attributed to AI, Klarna has set a benchmark in cost efficiency.

Among the tools the company utilises are Midjourney, DALL-E, and Firefly, which have notably decreased image production costs by US$6m.

Klarna CMO David Sandström highlights the transformative impact of AI, stating: "AI is helping us become leaner, faster and more responsive to what our customers care about, leading to a much, much better experience. And we’re actually driving more marketing activity while saving tens of millions of dollars a year.”

Beyond marketing, Klarna’s utilisation of AI extends to customer services via a partnership with OpenAI. This collaboration fostered the creation of an AI assistant, effectively handling tasks equivalent to 700 full-time employees. Gen AI tools are not just limited to customer interactions but also empower the Klarna workforce in their day-to-day tasks.

An impressive 87% of the company's workforce incorporate Gen AI tools into their daily workflows, particularly leveraging OpenAI’s assistant technologies.