hey Channel insiders welcome back to channel Insider partner POV your source for untapped opportunities and unfiltered opinions in the it Channel all to help you make Better Business decisions I'm your host Katie boso my guest today is our Amador co-founder and chief operations officer of quantum Street AI an IBM fintech partner focused on using AI powered by IBM Watson X to give wealth managers investors and financial institutions succinct up-to-date data from markets around the globe and give them time back in their days allart welcome thank you and thanks for having me Katie thank you so much for being here I'm so excited to dissect everything Quantum Street AI because what you do is so cool especially from a surface level getting to learn about you I'm excited to dig in so first of all I'll point out that you're an IBM fintech partner why don't you go ahead and give us a description of exactly what Quantum Street AI is and who you are as a company so Quantum Street AI uh what we do is we specialize in AI investment Solutions and we do this across various uh for various asset managers Banks wealth management and so really what we're trying to do is run a mission to help people investors make smarter investment data driven decisions so who are your customers you you talk about investment Banks but dig a Little Deeper on that and tell me who exactly we're talking about here and what's the ultimate problem that Quantum Street AI is solving for them our journey actually goes back to UC Berkeley during an MBA program that's actually where I met my two co-founders cheetah and Chris and we had taken several classes together specifically around investing so Equity investment strategies hedge funds and a lot of these classes were taught by Samu meski who is a very well-known uh and fantastic Professor that the three of us studied under and he would have some of the smartest investors come in there and they were all different kinds of investors so you had quantitative investors like aqr come in fundamental investors like Franklin Templeton for example and then you would also have all these different kinds of specializations sector specializations macro specializations and one of the thing that uh cheetah recognized and he had already two decades of AI and machine learning experience that uh he he'd been working at Intel as an engineering director and one of the things that he noticed was that the data was absolutely exploding at the time and this was back in like 2016 and so we had all these very smart investors come in but they all very much focus on one or two things so a fundamental investor just looks at you know balance sheets looks at earnings and you have a quantitative investor like aqr which cares just about price and doesn't look at earnings then you also have those fundamental managers who like you know I read three or four news articles about the company that I was interested in and so we started thinking about hey those two could actually benefit from seeing the other's perspective and so what if we could combine all of the investment information fundamental data macro data technical data as well as process news which is a huge part of the uh the current data environment it's about 90% of all the data is unstructured data which is things like like news and so how can we combine all that information to help people make smarter investment decisions and so we started working with a very small asset manager at first back in 2017 AI was still still kind of in its infancy you didn't have the big chat gbt moment that we saw more recently and so back then we were really pioneering the idea of applying AI technology to the investment process and so we got a lot of interest from various financial institutions we started actually working with banks uh first and foremost specifically quantitative investment Solutions teams I think that they were kind of the probably ideal candidate because they understood a lot of the Advan uh science and math behind what it was that we were we were doing so it kind of helped them wrap their arms uh around that a little bit and so right now predominantly our clients are Global Banks but we do also work with asset managers and I think as we think about the adoption process I think we see Banks first and then asset managers and wealth managers adopted and I think that's also partly due to to regulatory constraints as well so I do have some more questions having to do with your customers but I want to backtrack for a minute because you brought up your friends that you met at UC Berkeley and that this sort of just slid into the company story but I know there's more in between that so could you dig more into the story of how Quantum Street AI sort of came to be and and talk about how did IBM come into the picture there yeah so back at UC Berkeley during the NBA program when we had all these investors come in we were thinking about how we could combine all this information together to help people make smarter investment decisions as I mentioned cheetah cataa two decades at in AI machine learning so we started to think about which platforms could we use in order to uh make this all all happen and so we tested several platforms and when I say tested several platforms one of the biggest things that we were doing is I mentioned the unstructured data of the news so we thought about how could we process millions of news articles and social media posts and combine that with the traditional financial data and so we looked at all the different uh natural language processing engines out there and we test Ed them because our commitment was and still is today to be on the best performing platform and best performing means specific to our application which is the application to investing and so we tested multiple platforms we uncovered that IBM's platform uh was the best uh for our use case and uh in addition to identifying that we started experimenting and exploring uh with the platform and IBM is fantastic for startups in that um they have all these different programs and they had reached out to us and said hey you know we're seeing your usage like can you tell us a little bit about what it is that you're doing and we told them you know how we're applying it to to the finance space and investing and uh they got really excited about it and they asked us to be part of something called the IBM Global entrepreneur program which doesn't exist today anymore I think they well I mean that that name doesn't exist they changed the name it's still the program is uh is still there but it's it's something else I was going to say did cap it off with you because they couldn't go beyond that they said this is the best we we got to retire the program no they're they're still out there helping many many many startups and I definitely encourage you know anyone who's kind of new and looking for something to to check it out but so what they what they did for us is they they put us in this thing called the IAM Global entrepreneur program and they allocated credits to us six digits worth of credits and those credits we were able to utilize for the first year and a half of operating the business business shortly after that they introduced us to a program called the with Watson program and that was incredibly helpful so the with Watson program allowed us to go out and talk about our IBM usage that IBM is a partner of ours and that we're using the IBM platform so I remember back at UC Berkeley when we were talking to Sam oesi the professor and he was kind of like well you know cheetah and art Chris you guys can't just run out there and just be like we are the AI investment platforms like that is going to require like a lot of work you're have to be traveling everywhere and like Willie to to do all that and so I was really thinking about that like it's hard to be recognized amongst many many many many startups so once once they kind of introduce this problem well what if we go out there and we're like yes we are quanton treat but also we're a with Watson company the media just really grabbed a hold of that they're like IBM and this startup is launching this AI powered exchange tra it's the first one ever and then Bloomberg put it on their their timeline of significant like AI events that that occurred Google's you know go moment IBM's Jeopardy moment and there we are you know launching the world's first a powered Exchange Trade fund so I think the the the fact that we partnered with them brought a ton of visibility to us and that also really helped bring the clients as well because when you think about it as a as a startup and also in the financial service space trust is everything credibility is is everything and although chah has two of AI experience I was in wealth management Fidelity for a decade and Chris is ex Goldman Sachs who managed $30 billion in assets still we were a startup and having a large partner stand next to us and say they're with us helped change I think our investors perception and their willingness to try new technology to try something new that they hadn't done before now you mentioned Fidelity there and I was going to bring that up you have a decade of working with Fidelity and working with some crazy amounts of money let's just say that at least $1.5 billion dollars in money and assets for your customers that you were Consulting with and I think that in itself is so impressive but was there ever a point working at Fidelity that you saw a moment where you said I really could have used or my customers really could have used what Quantum Street AI offers now so our office would open to customers at about 8:00 and we would have our high net worth investors come in and we would engage them in investment planning estate planning retirement planning Insurance planning all the different assets of of wealth management uh but I would come in an hour two hours early and I would essentially study the markets and even today the number one tool for financial advisors is Google so I would go in I would read Fidelity's research I would read other research that was coming in because your investors want you to seem knowledgeable and they're inevitably going to ask me what do you think or what does Fidelity think where do you where do you see the markets headed and so I would need to understand where and and these are multi-asset investors they invest in US Stocks International stocks they invest in fixed income which is bonds and they you know also hold cash emergency funds so they have these multi-asset uh portfolio and so I need to understand where are US Stocks going International stocks emerging stocks where what's happening in different sectors technology so I'd have to do all this research because essentially what we're going to engage in is discussion of here's where your portfolio is at here's where Fidelity thinks the market is headed here are the adjustments that we need to ultimately make to uh to your portfolio that you're better positioned for the future and you could capture these returns and so that was a lot of data analysis for me and I mean how many news articles can I read in any given day I'm you know meeting with with clients and reviewing their retirement plans and estate plans so having that ability to succinctly analyze millions of news articles and come up with a summarization requires a lot of time as I mentioned a couple hours probably each day and like I said how much how much data was I actually touching like this much so with our Street platform we're processing a million news articles every day and we're doing this ibms and LP engine can do more than 30 different languages so this is global data and so now on the quantum Street platform I can read a AI summary generative AI summary that tells me what is happening around the world and how it relates to these various asset classes very succinct uh summary and I can also get forecasts on different Securities different markets different asset classes so it really kind of shrinks all that time required down and captures a lot more information than I could have in those two hours before the Market opens so you're not just giving succinct data to your customers you're giving them time back to invest in whatever they want that's right now you mentioned some of those International customers and I recently saw that Quantum Street AI collaborated with BMP paraba to bring services to Brazil so where are your services available are you worldwide yeah so when we first when we first started uh we focused on us equities because you have to start somewhere and there's 50,000 companies globally that are traded around publicly traded around the world their own private companies it's even more than that we started analyzing uh us companies but our customers like HSBC like B&P paraba they are Global in nature so we will talk to their offices in London and in Hong Kong and in this case in uh in Brazil in obviously also in the US which is our predominant Market uh so one of the things that they were kind of pushing us towards in the very beginning was hey how can you expand across different first expand your stock coverage from us to International to cover all of our different operations but also expand asset classes too so not just cover stocks but also cover bonds and commodities uh and other alternative asset classes and so we really expanded that asset coverage so that we can serve these clients and this is also why it's important to have a good vendor because I mentioned natural language processing which is a big component of what we're doing having IBM able to process 30 different languages because we'll have potentially a customer um in Japan and they will say well what do you know about the Japanese market and we're like oh well you know this is how much data we're processing in the Japanese Market these are all the Japanese Securities we're covering these are all the forecasts that we're we're we're making so our system knows a lot it's learned a lot and aggregated data on the Japanese Market over time both in their native language as well as other languages including us that may apply directly to the uh the Japanese Equity markets or Bond markets so it's really important to have a good Global vendor uh and a global offering so that we can serve our customers which tend to be Global Banks or Global financial institutions yeah let's talk more about your customers now because I would love for you to walk me through a success story uh where Quantum Street AI was able to meet a customer need and just one that sticks out to you we're saying customers but I very much think of them as partners and I think they think of us as as partners and we think of IBM as partner so when we uh bring on customers is really like a three-way type of partnership what I mean by that is uh you know let's take you mentioned BNP paraba so let's take them as an example BNP paraba wanted to create a custom AI powered index that covers a multi-asset class so it covers like us equities and Japanese equities and Chinese equities and Japanese bonds and commodities with the exception of Agriculture so it's like metals and Mining and energy and wanted it to be like long and short so they're thinking about what is the solution that is best for our investors and in this case they wanted to work with a bank called XP which is the largest Brazilian bank and so they're talking to their their customers and saying hey what kind of indices are you are you interested in we're going to create a a structured product and what a structured product is is a bank will uh sell an investor retail investor a CD that CD is linked to that index in this case it's the AI power cross Trend index that looks across all the different asset classes and can go long short different kinds of markets and uh they invest in that and then they ultimately get a payoff after a year two years three years depending upon how long their their CD investment is so our client and their a lot of times their client are coming up with a a strategy which you know what different asset classes are important to them so they're designing all of that and we're helping them with the inputs and helping them understand what's possible on our system and we co-created an AI powered uh index for them but the index like our our relationship doesn't just stop at like okay we've built the index and and now we're done AI still requires a lot of Education around it so we help them engage in a goto Market strategy as well and this is also where IBM comes in so I was down in Brazil they have a IBM Innovation Studio they actually have IBM Innovation Studios all over the world we've done these in China and Japan us Germany London so they have these Innovation Studios and what these Innovation Studios do is they have different kinds of AI assets there these are like use cases real live use cases so for example they have a autonomous race car and race car goes around the track and what you end up seeing is every time the race car goes around the track it keeps getting better and better better through like the machine learning process and so they can see these real life use cases and then we link it back to our investment process and say here are the different asset classes and we're making forecasts and every forecast we we make we observe the data like in the case of the shape of the racetrack and then we incorporate that into the next forecast and those forecasts over time can improve based on the learnings and so we really help our investors get their clients help them wrap their arms around these different use cases and uh different a Technologies and how they're being applied into the product that they're ultimately out there selling because a lot of times in the business model that we engage in we are also rewarded based on their success so they're going to go out and raise assets and sell this strategy these Financial products to retail investors and so the more we help them raise the level of assets product sales the better we do and so across five continents now our customers have sold over six billion dollar in financial products when it comes to the the laws behind AI which at this point in the US they're really aren't many it's a tricky business AI it's something that I think like you said in 2016 people were not paying as much attention to uh as they are right now the last couple of years have really given such a a boom to this uh sector so there is some conversation happening in Washington about artificial intelligence so how does IBM help you navigate the shifting landscape behind that when it comes to AI when we think about AI we think about explainability transparency these are all very important things to our customer and we also think about governance and and ethics and so we really want to you know focus on our technology and focus on the application but we want to also be ethical and I think when it comes to trust and credibility and ethics in the AI space IBM is a leader I was doing a IBM innovation Studio event with a large global bank and IBM had mentioned to me that the day before they had people from the hill and actually it's the top PE I can't say their names but it was the top people that are engaged specifically in this uh and it wasn't just IBM it was you know IBM also had brought leaders in from other companies too so I think that also kind of goes to show that they're leading the way um but they also value other companies opinions as it relates to to ethics so we are we're working with them and we're kind of following behind them to apply these various ethics also to what what we're doing and so I'm very comfortable in in the fact that we are following the leader as it relates to the ethical application of uh of AI so my last question for you today art would just be how can interested businesses or buyers get in touch with you and learn more about Quantum Street Ai and potentially engage your business I would suggest you visit uh Quantum Street ai.com we have a book a demo in there or AI index uh consultation that that you can sign up for also you can find me on LinkedIn as well uh or shoot me an email at art.
Amador Quantum Street a.com allart thank you so much it's been a pleasure getting to know you and getting to know Quantum Street AI thank you for your time today thanks for having me ktie it's been a pleasure thanks so much to art for joining me today and thank you for watching or listening you can check out every episode of Channel Insider partner PO on Channel insider.com or watch us on our YouTube page at Channel inssider newsand Trends you can also listen to this episode and every episode as a podcast on your favorite podcast listening platform like apple podcasts or Spotify podcasts don't forget to like subscribe and follow wherever possible so you never miss an episode come connect with Channel Insider on LinkedIn or X at Channel Insider or with me at Katie boso once again I'm your host Katie boso and I'll see you next time
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