Nvidia Corp. today announced a multiyear “innovation partnership” in which it will work closely with Germany’s Deutsche Bank AG to accelerate the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies in the financial services industry.

The partnership, announced today, is all about fulfilling the potential of AI and machine learning in the banking sector. The two companies, which have been working on the partnership for the past 18 months, plan to develop a wide range of regulatory compliant AI-powered services. In addition, Deutsche Bank said working closely with Nvidia will enable it to accelerate its digital transformation efforts by using AI to simplify and accelerate decisions around cloud migration, for example.

The two companies are planning to collaborate in many different areas, but the one with the most potential is risk model development. Important tasks in the banking sector, such as price discovery, risk valuation and model backtesting, involve doing lots of computationally intensive calculations. These are traditionally done using massive central processing unit-driven server grid farms.

However, Deutsche Bank said it will instead tap Nvidia’s expertise in accelerated computing, powered by graphics processing units and coupled with AI, to enable traders to manage risk better by running more scenarios faster. Deutsche Bank said many functions that were typically processed overnight, such as risk valuation, can now be performed in real time thanks to Nvidia’s accelerated compute.

As part of the collaboration, Deutsche Bank said it will leverage the Nvidia AI Enterprise platform that’s used to streamline the development of AI models on-premises or in the cloud. This will give it the flexibility it needs to run AI workloads wherever they’re required, the bank explained.

“Accelerated computing and AI are at a tipping point, and we’re bringing them to the world’s enterprises through the cloud,” said Nvidia founder and Chief Executive Jensen Huang. “Every aspect of future business will be supercharged with insight and intelligence running at the speed of light. Together with Deutsche Bank, we are modernizing and reimagining the way financial services are operated and delivered.”

Deutsche Bank is also looking at ways in which AI can be used to deliver new, interactive experiences for employees, potential recruits and customers that involve using 3D virtual avatars, it said. During its exploratory work with Nvidia, Deutsche Bank used Nvidia’s Omniverse Enterprise platform to create a 3D virtual avatar to help new employees navigate internal banking systems and respond to questions from its human resources department. Looking ahead, Deutsche Bank will work with Nvidia to create additional immersive metaverse experiences for its banking clients, with digital avatars and virtual assistants powered by AI.

Another major use case Deutsche Bank is looking into is the extraction of useful insights from the masses of unstructured data it collects. While AI has already proven its worth in data analytics in the past, the problem for banks is that existing models don’t perform very well when it comes to unstructured, financial texts. Deutsche Bank is instead looking to use new neural networks known as “transformers” to improve this. It explained that a single, pretrained transformer model is capable of performing amazing feats already, including text generation, translation and even software programming.

As such, Deutsche Bank has already begun working with Nvidia to test a collection of AI models called “Finformers,” or financial transformers, that can tap unstructured data to spot early warning signs of counterparty risk, fraud, issues with data quality and more.

Finally, Deutsche Bank said it’s planning to work with Nvidia to expand its existing internal AI center of excellence to support the experimentation and development of AI services and professional skills development. Ultimately, it wants to develop, foster and promote explainable and responsible AI models that can expand its understanding of AI predictions in financial services.

“This partnership is a significant step forward in our AI and ML ambitions,” said Bernd Leukert, a Deutsche Bank board member responsible for technology, data and innovation.

Photo: Nvidia