Category: Cloud

2023 Gartner Emerging Technologies and Trends Impact Radar

Gartner has released its 2023 Gartner Emerging Technologies and Trends Impact Radar. Let me try to give it a read with the eyes of a wealth
or asset manager.

Artificial Intelligence is all over the radar, with Foundation Models, Self-Supervised Learning, Generative AI, and more. Wealth and asset managers must seriously look into Artificial Intelligence and understand how it can be leveraged across their value chain, from investments to operations, risk management, and compliance. Part of the solution will come from their solution providers, like Bloomberg, BlackRock Aladdin, or State Street Alpha, to name a few providers. But wealth and asset managers cannot only rely on their providers. Instead, they must acquire the necessary skills and talent and play with artificial intelligence technologies. War for talent will make it complicated.

Blockchain is also quite present with Web3 and Tokenization, both being in the 3-6-year horizon. Most wealth and asset managers are already testing tokenization in one way or another, and they should continue. Tokenization will have many benefits for the industry, from speeding up transactions, eliminating some intermediaries and therefore reducing costs, making some asset classes available to smaller investors, improving the liquidity of some assets, and more. Tokenization will require some industry alignment and standards.

No surprise, Digital Twins are here too. Gartner is probably thinking more about Digital Twins in the context of manufacturing and industrial activities. But as discussed in this blog, the potential for digital twins in the financial industry is real and massive.

Then, there are hardware and infrastructure with Neuromorphic Computing, 6G, and Hyperscale Edge Computing. If wealth and asset managers continue to move to the cloud, they’ll be able to leverage these latest hardware technologies as they become available in the cloud.

Wall Street continues to move to the public cloud

All big Wall Street players like JPMorgan, Citadel, Point72 continue to move to the public cloud. As INSIDER puts it, “who they are and what they do is now more important than ever.” While the business case is not evident, even if the move to the cloud is just break-even, elasticity, the ecosystem, and innovation are key drivers for moving to the public cloud. Not to mention that with today’s supply chain challenges, probably the only option to access some infrastructure quickly. And most likely the only way to continue to compete in the future. For those still skeptical about security, I wonder what makes them believe on-prem is safer? Who can compete with the USD 20 billion and USD 10 billion Microsoft and Google will respectively spend on security over the next five years?

And Wall Street is not alone in moving to the public cloud. Microsoft and the London Stock Exchange Group have just signed a new deal, where Microsoft will buy a GBP 1.5 bn stack of the LSEG, LSEG is committed to spending GBP 2.3 bn at Microsoft, and both will leverage advanced technologies like machine learning and native Azure solutions to improve LSEG’s data and analytics capabilities. And more. This follows similar partnerships between Google and CME, and AWS and Nasdaq.