Technology for Trade: Spurring Industry Growth

[Music] okay good morning everyone thank you for joining us here today um I think it probably makes sense you you might have heard of these two individuals before but we should give them the opportunity to introduce themselves so to start with seeing as your sat to my left first Yoni why don't you introduce us tell us a little bit about eoro hi I'm ym co-founder and CEO of eoro iter is the world's largest social investment network uh we have 37 million registered users uh and 3 and a half million brokerage accounts of our customers around the world who trade US Stocks uh now also du buy incoming adx stocks alongside crypto Assets in a social network where everybody can see follow and copy the most successful investors on our platform and it's been a very exciting Journey over the past year we've been celebrating our launch here in the UAE as an ad M company uh for the past year and very excited about the opportunities here certainly very prominent here given that your logo is right in my eyeline uh richy yourself uh CEO of Oak North sure um Oak North is a commercial digital Bank um started about nine years ago very specifically helps companies which are scaling up so in their scale up Journey um we've lent about 15 billion doll to to those types of companies across the UK and us over the nine years that we've been existence um and and really in our view bought the investment banking type experience down to smaller scaleup businesses which has tremendously helped them through their through their scaleup Journeys um we believe we've helped create about 40,000 new jobs through the lending that we've done um uh to to that Community all right one of the things I love about Abu Dhabi Finance week is the fact that they keep these sessions very short which means I'm going to selfishly ask the question for me first first uh look let's put aside this question of what AI is going to do is it going to be transformative is it not and let's just assume for a minute that it is I think everyone here is probably in agreement with that instead I'm going to ask you the question of given that both of you are looking at Ai and looking at how it integrates in your own platform and your own Solutions how on Earth do you stay on top of all of these products launching constantly every day Yi let's go to you first so uh you have to force yourself you have 1500 employees in itoro uh and over the past two years I found found myself really forcing the organization to focus on AI and figure out what does it mean to be an AI first company because the biggest threat is that the competition will be AI first companies and they'll be fasters because they'll use all of the tools so just as an example last week we paused all day-to-day activities of our 600 employees in the Solutions in Development Group and we said you have 3 days hackathon here are licenses to cursor EX a open a like all of the tools that are available and you see them online and we told them just build products Now show us what you can build and launch with in 72 hours people were sleeping in the office and they were amazed like they were for the first time we had programmers who were actually just not writing code and told me we can't believe what these tools are doing right so you have to detach yourself from the daytoday and force the organization to use new tools sometime it's very hard to do but it's a must in an a a first world sounds like a big focus on culture there Richi is that something you'd agree with so look I mean very similar very similar uh approach for us I think that um the the threat that you get from companies which are AI first but also the threat which you get from business models which currently don't exist which can exist because of AI which will fundamentally change the way that consumers or your customer base effectively go and look for service and therefore embed your potential offering in a way which which just hasn't been done to date um so thinking about it almost both ways right really from the customer perspective in terms of how their experience is going to change and then really from um your perspective as a provider um how that's going to evolve and exactly I said it's sort of doing hackathons being being across a lot of the Technologies there's so much Evolution which is moving so so quickly it's not like it's not like you can take people offline go and send them away for a month and come back and expect them to do Miracles it has to be in line it has to be as you're you're running and it has to be embedded and let's be frank the technology is novel and the ability to go all the way and actually deploy is still somewhat Limited in a number of areas right so you always have to have a human in the loop and the question is with a human in the loop does it take longer does it take shorter what efficiencies are you getting but it's like continuing to persevere through that which which as your point on culture means that you have to break through the culture of number one being willing to try something different but within that also being willing to say actually this isn't going to give me benefit necessarily immediately are so here's a question for me though you are focusing on AI trying to build that culture in your organization does that then create an opportunity for you in comparison to your competitors and in a highly competitive landscape that you're already operating in I think unless you do that I mean like y said you won't be here in five 10 years time right because they will be AI first companies which figure out how to actually fundamentally deliver for the customer in a much better much more effective Manner and probably Build a Better Business on the back of it because it's a more efficient B business it's a more flexible business and I think the thing which you sort of see in the fintech space across and banking is you see a move to hyper personalization and Hyper personalization is more aided by tools like AI because fundamentally you can you can afford to go that much deeper on each individual instance because of the technology so so I think it's almost like you can't afford not to you just can run like 10x faster 100x faster right so there there used to be this notion of 100x developer right or the 10x devel 10x engineer one person can do the work of 10 or 100 other people suddenly your entire organization is 100x if you use these tools so the pace of innovation is mind-blowing then you need to figure figure out how does that impact the strategy of my company right so we're in the business of enabling access to Investments but I have no doubt that we're on the path now of using AI to basically become your financial advisor your family office right uh PE for everyone right so suddenly you can get advice that is the advice of the smartest financial adviser in the world with the access to all of the global information and your personalized information to actually tell you what you should do with your money so and those Notions didn't exist three years ago they exist now and they impact the strategy of any company all right Yi connect the dots for us here then the panel is meant to be titled sparing industry growth so what does it look like when we take this AI technology this hyper personalization how is that going to change the shape of Finance is it going to be just better products for retail investors what does that look like democratization of Finance I think right now and again you sort of see the different layers in wealth management trading investing there's a lot of fragmentation uh but I think when I look at our business it's what you would consider like the family office right everything from looking understanding all of your sources of income right through open banking we can see how you know when your salary is we know uh you know what are your expenses uh through open banking as well now we can manage uh we understand taxes right across multiple jurisdictions here's the this is the favorite one uh so taxes tax rappers planning estate everything becomes extremely easy and today it's extremely fragmented and complicated so I think AI basically drives significant changes to the deployment of capital to the efficiency of capital and therefore also to the scale of capital Richie could we go to you similar question this time but maybe you could come at it more from the impact that it might have on the marketplace and and on small businesses sure so so if you go through and actually have a look at how I'll just go to Consumer first and then come back to to commercial the the banking experience is really evolved you've gone from this the stage stage where you typically had one provider and you almost did everything with that one provider to a world where now that experience is pretty much disaggregated across a number of different providers and typically you still have a traditional bank but you'd have a Traditional Bank you'll have someone to potentially move transact money with and you'll probably have someone to to sort of invest money with right and you may have someone different to invest money with in stocks and shares versus into funds and asset management or not but but much more disintegrated experience within the SMB commercial world you still have very much a single provider typically in terms of your financial requirements a traditional bank and clearly with Oak North we're working to to pull that apart right and and sort of break through that so most of our customers end up having multiple providers I think as you as you look at what with just Technologies which increase the level of personalization the firms which tend to be more Innovative with Technologies tend not to be the incumbents so that tends to then push to more disaggregation more disaggregation causes more complexity in managing that overall so therefore you need that layer which unites that back so I think I think that that experience is something which is happening both in the consumer World also in in sort of the commercial World pulling on this thread a little bit because I think you touched on it there as much as we might all get excited about the impact that AI could have in the industry are you seeing the same thing from the customer standpoint do they understand what the potential is here are they getting excited by the prospect I mean look our customers are all about fundamentally they want funding to grow and they want to be able to move their money around in an easy basis right and transact efficiently and not end up in like the endless Loops which you end up with with a lot of incumbent banks in terms of you want who make large payments and your large payment gets stuck and then you go through a wild goose chase for three days trying to un sort of get it unstuck so it's pretty pretty like trivial stuff right but it's not necessarily trivial it's important day-to-day stuff right um but that's where the challenge is now do they care if it's AI which you're using for transaction monitoring which you're using to actually create better algorithms to enable your transactions to go through on a smoother basis they don't care what they care about is fundamentally how you're delivering to them so so I I think we're seeing something a bit different because again our consumer are consu are looking for new products I'll just give an example because you you now develop things to Consumers and you don't even understand what you've delivered so I'll give two examples uh we signed with adx this week to bring adx shares and I said okay but how do I know what adx shares exist what are their C like access to data I go to our chat in Toro that we developed and I asked it what are the top 10 adx shares what are the top 10 adx t Tech shares what are the revenues it and it already knows everything and we haven't done anything it's just there because it has the access to the entire Global Information and it's already there I'll give another example of like how this is powerful for the democratization of capital and wealth so I'm a fan of capital markets you know I love the stories of like Ken Griffin and Citadel or Jim Simmons and Renaissance of this quantitative uh trading abilities but I've always thought that you know it's it's extremely hard to build a quanum but with these tools we took our quanti machine learning team started looking at the data to generate Market neutral long long short strategies and you know and boom it's like cuz you're telling an AI look at all of the data external data internal data now generate for me performance and we're looking at the results and I'm like we're generating 20 30% irrs and Market neutral strategies I couldn't believe we'd be able to do that in a company where it's not necessarily the focus so all of these tools that used to take a lot of effort to build in generation of capital are becoming now accessible and we're making them accessible to our retail clients well I mean that sounds like an incredibly uh incredibly interesting future that could be exciting for everyone involved since we're talking a little bit about the future uh and we only have a few minutes left I want to talk about what both of your thoughts are and what the future looks like for the markets where are we heading in the next year um whether that be in crypto as well as traditional stocks um it's been a bit of a wild ride over the past 12 months um y let's go to you first um so first of all we've been enjoying very much the bullish markets The Roaring markets uh or this year I think we we met about a month ago this was be just before uh the election and before suddenly crypto going all the way Bitcoin to 100,000 but are you our customers have seen significant scale of their wealth over the last a month and a half both in crypto markets and the stock markets I think generally the sentiment in the market is going to be a very good year next year um because everybody's expecting an extremely supportive US government of both crypto markets stock markets technology uh sort of taking a bit off the burden of Regulation and sort of streamlining that from the US and uh that usually sort of generates uh the the returns for others but I'll just say that with a bit of a grain of salt everybody you ask are saying that it's going to be a great year next year in the markets and usually when the consensus is so strong that everything is going to be fine something bad happens so uh uh diversification is important in your portfolio Global diversification and asset diversification uh so if there is somewhere a crash uh you you can you can manage it I said I was being selfish I will take that on board myself Richie same same question to you so so look our visibility on the on the capital markets is is less but I would say in terms of the real economy is very very high um so what we do is we also license our technology to some major US Banks um through that we have about half a trillion dollars worth of us commercial lending dat going through our our product um and our model so we have a pretty good sense in terms of the pulse on the ground in the US and UK in terms of actually how those those scale up low midle Market companies are actually performing and I would say that they've been incredibly robust all the way through the interest rating raising cycle the inflation cycle obviously the the political uh Tailwinds Which business have has in the US W today um given the president-elect I think are is are definitely positive I think the the clear unknown which we've experienced over the last several years is there a lot of like unknown macro events which just come and and just hit right um and clearly the world's a pretty fragile place at the moment so I would say x anything very material in that regard Beyond and above where we are today um I think pretty positive in again everybody's expecting interest rates to go down right interest rates in in capital markets is like gravity right he said he loves the boring business of just customers depositing cash I think cash is boring uh but when interest rates if you can make money off cash it's not boring yeah it's still boring but you can make money boring money um but when interest rate go down generally people then start deploying their cash people and people are people like the largest asset managers in the world uh but it's retail investors so when you have a billion dollars like uh five 5% interest rate is a lot you might be saying okay I'm Bor it's boring but it makes money when it goes generally under like 3% and I and I think expectations are it's nearing there then everything becomes interesting because I I'll put money on the fact it's not going to go below 3% next year I didn't say which currency on stage everybody um look last question um 30 seconds and then we'll have to call it here we are sat here in Abu Dhabi for Abu Dhabi Finance week so I think it's only fair that we bring the conversation finally to here what is the role that Abu Dhabi and the UAE is playing in spurring growth in the finance ecosystem um y will go with you first then um Richie youve got the final word so we we've seen here uh amazing growth over the past year um of this this the as a region right so we look at our company here as a hub potentially for the region we're very focused first on UAE and then understanding how can we expand it Toro from the UAE to the region I think that that's a huge opportunity for roro uh and as uh Mike milin told me this is probably the place to bring the first million millionaires tooro very nice Richi um I think the Innovation the financial Innovation the fact that we are sitting here at an event which is fundamentally sponsored by the regulator the fact that um ABAB has launched fin Street as the as the first um tokenized exchange across across Securities just shows how much Innovation is being driven from care and how open uh this Market is to effectively encouraging innovators to come and expand so I I think that's phenomenal well on that positive note only exists for me to say thank you Yoni thank you rishy for joining us both here today thank you very much excellent thank you very much [Music] w