Exclusive | Liquidnet CEO: Artificial intelligence is the future direction of finance
- Artificial intelligence, machine learning will help fund managers, traders improve performance, according to Seth Merrin
- Managers who do not embrace the technology could be replaced in the future
Seth Merrin, the chief executive of Liquidnet, is making a big bet that the future of trading – and the edge that traders and portfolios managers seek – will be driven by artificial intelligence.
Merrin said one of the main problems that he hears from clients is how to improve performance, particularly as fund managers are increasingly overwhelmed with the amount of publicly available data that can influence investment decisions.
But, very few of the privately held firm’s clients have the capability or time to develop their AI-driven technology to help analyse that data, Merrin said.
“You have an explosion of data and, at the same time, you have a maturity in the use and the capabilities of artificial intelligence,” Merrin said. “The only way that you can take advantage of all the data out there and to differentiate, analyse it, process it, is using artificial intelligence.”
The company, founded in 1999, is an institutional trading network provider for more than 1,000 institutional investors that collectively manage US$33 trillion in assets.
Earlier this month, Liquidnet bought Prattle, an analytics platform that uses natural language processing and machine learning to measure sentiment, for an undisclosed amount.