Source: Forbes | 2018
Author: Moira Vetter
Every minute of every hour we hear more about the vast, sometimes scary power of artificial intelligence. We’ve invited it into our homes and businesses. In some cases, it has come in uninvited.
Last week, the President of Microsoft, Brad Smith, wrote a piece about the need for both regulation and corporate responsibility to ensure that technology is used for good.
And technology can do incredible good. Particularly when technologies such as AI, machine learning and natural language processing (NLP) are used not to replace people, but to enhance the human connection between business professionals and their customers.
Nathan Stevenson, the CEO of Forwardlane, spoke to me about mindboggling things his company is doing in wealth management. Forwardlane is a cognitive application and platform that is deployed in a wealth management firm’s infrastructure to help wealth managers synthesize, analyze and organize the infinite data they draw on to make Forwardlane’s platform and their expanding set of APIs enable wealth managers to absorb and activate internal and external qualitative and quantitative data in a fraction of the time it takes an expert analyst to get only a fractional view.
“Inside The Tornado” of hypergrowth
For those too young to know Geoffrey Moore, his books Crossing The Chasm and Inside The Tornado examined companies in hypergrowth. Their visions align so profoundly with mass market need and opportunity that the entrepreneurs must belt in while hurtling toward the upper right quadrant.
Stevenson, the son of a tech entrepreneur and an elementary school teacher, is a native of beautiful and often volatile South Africa. His comfort with volatility and his own background in serial entrepreneurship, quantitative finance, and enterprise architecture have made him perfectly fit for the ride he is on.
Forwardlane, based in New York City and London, was founded in 2016 and rapidly advanced to two pre-eminent accelerators, TechStars and FinTech Innovation Lab. These relationships enabled Forwardlane to work directly with private banks and leading wealth managers to understand their overwhelming everyday reality and fine tune the delivery strategy for the platform and APIs.
Wealth managers, like the rest of us, are at peak human performance. They can’t work any harder, or research any longer, to derive the insight they need to help their clients. They need technology to help them make sense of a vast array of continuous data across a huge collection of portfolios with highly individualized goals.