Artificial intelligence research in finance: discussion and examples

Abstract Artificial intelligence (AI) is a science and engineering discipline that is highly relevant to financial services, given the significant amount and diversity of data generated (and consumed) as those services are delivered worldwide. Global banks process billions of international payments each day, while equity exchanges handle trillions of orders and billions of transactions. All of this activity is recorded as data, and driven by exogenous information sources such as news services and social media. To address these challenges, at J.P. Morgan, we established a new group dedicated to research at the intersection of AI and finance in mid-2018 to investigate how to develop and optimize the use of AI. In this article, we introduce and discuss the directions of focus of AI Research and present a few selective projects that illustrate potential novel applications to finance.