Toronto-based Manulife Financial Corp. announced on Friday that its Lab of Forward Thinking (LOFT) is now collaborating with Boston-based Indico Data Solutions Inc., which specializes in deep learning.
As part of the collaboration, Manulife’s LOFT will use Indico’s platform to develop an artificial intelligence (AI) and deep learning tool to analyze unstructured financial data. Using deep learning, Manulife will be able to analyze data from news articles, analyst reports and other similar sources and present recommendations that could help investment researchers and portfolio managers make more informed decisions.
“Deep learning, while proven in the realms of the Facebooks and Googles of the world, is just starting to come into its own as an enterprise capability,” says Slater Victoroff, Indico’s CEO and co-founder, in a statement. “We have spent the past few years building a platform that significantly lowers the barriers of use around deep learning and this opens up tremendous potential around unstructured data analytics.”
Manulife’s LOFT is using Indico’s deep learning platform to decipher natural language and train the computer more efficiently to extract insights that can be tailored to each analyst’s individual , which is one of Indico’s core strengths. Manulife has established a global network of LOFTs in Boston, Toronto and Singapore.
“Indico will help us accelerate our use of deep learning to improve the decision-making capabilities of our analysts, portfolio managers and researchers,” says Greg Framke, executive vice president and chief information officer with Manulife, in a statement. “By introducing new capabilities that we know will add to our user experience and overall impact, we will improve the customer experience.”
The announcement follows on Manulife LOFT’s recent collaboration with Nervana Systems to build the next generation of intelligent applications.
“Although it’s early, we are now starting to see some compelling opportunities revolving around deep learning powered applications that can help knowledge workers become much more efficient,” says Vishal Daga, chief customer officer with indico, in a statement. “We are continuing to invest in our product capabilities to make it easier for our customers to deploy our product in this vein especially in the context of the financial services industry. We are thrilled about the innovative work that the Manulife team has been doing and look forward to continuing our partnership with them.”