Bloomberg - AI Fintech Sees Demand Soar on Wall Street

"Artificial intelligence tools are in high demand across Wall Street, drawing the attention of regulators and critics alike", according to Chief Executive Officer of Toggle AI Jan Szilagyi.

“There’s a lot of excitement about the technology” as well as “uncertainty about where it’s going to lead us,” Szilagyi said in an interview with Bloomberg Television. His AI-powered market analytics platform, backed by Stan Druckenmiller, serves professional investors from hedge funds to brokerage firms.

Artificial intelligence isn’t new to the financial world, with thousands of firms using machines to speed up how they invest and train employees. But the scope of firms using AI is widening, according to Szilagyi. His firm has seen “very quick adoption and experimentation with the technology. And people are using it to better search for data, documents and so on,” he said.

The recent rise of ChatGPT and other language-driven software has brought renewed interest and criticism around AI applications. This week US Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Gary Gensler said a concentration of companies developing AI models or data sets could become a destabilizing factor in the financial sector. His agency plans to propose new regulations to address conflicts of interest related to brokerages or money managers using AI with clients.

The biggest risks to the banks and their use of AI is regulation, as well as concerns over the accuracy of results, Szilagyi said. But firms are taking steps to avoid potential abuse, disruptive behavior and inaccurate information, he said. “There are enough safeguards that everybody is putting in place and thinking about early on that we are going to be able to overcome that so far.”

The 44-year-old former hedge fund quant trader and chief investment officer founded Toggle AI in 2019. The firm uses machine learning to turbocharge investment decision-making. Headquartered in New York with offices in London and Tokyo, Toggle’s clients include Samsung Securities, MUFG in Japan and Interactive Brokers in the US.

Szilagyi was hired by Druckenmiller, first as an intern and then as a trader, at Druckenmiller’s Duquesne Capital before it was converted into a family office. Szilagyi says Druckenmiller “was able to draw on parallels to his past experience of dislocations [in the market] to immediately create a mental picture of what the likely outcomes were.” Today, Toggle AI analytics helps create the same picture for users, he said."

Read the full article on Bloomberg.