W&F October 2017

www.wealthandfinance-news.com 14 Wealth & Finance International - October 2017 A sub-field of AI is a particularly strong example of applications of augmented intelligence – Natural Language Processing. NLP is the development of systems capable of reading and understanding the languages that humans speak or write. At the heart of this technology is the effort of interpreting a large amount of so-called ‘unstructured data’ (i.e. written and spoken data, such as PDF files, images and audio material). FinTech is leveraging this technology because it significantly improves customer interactions, not only by implementing chatbots. As a knowledge-intensive sector, key tasks in the financial industry require the reading and understanding of large amounts of information that are, indeed, only partly structured. NLP will make processes much easier, faster and more precise with less effort than ever for humans. Startups such as MonkeyLearn are already leveraging NLP to automate business intelligence information, whereas leading Japanese asset manager Nomura Asset Management (NAM) is investing to understand whether this technology can improve the decision-making processes of portfolio management’s investors. Law firms are turning towards NLP, automated document analytics and law case reporting within due diligence processes. When we started to work at our new virtual data room, Drooms NXG, putting our users at the heart of the software was our goal. Aware of the fact that the biggest issue for users of our data rooms was to keep up with time-consuming and demanding document analysis, we wanted to implement the most effective technology to make this possible. As NLP enables the reading and understanding of language, we then saw a huge opportunity in applying this new technology to apprehend the content of data room documentation. Today, the Drooms Findings Manager module goes through the information thanks to smart pre-set categories – which are continuously expanded to reflect specialised areas like intellectual property (IP) and pension - suggests red flags, lists documents per relevance and provides recommendations for smarter risk and opportunity management. Similarly, we wanted to abate language barriers between users. Now, documents can be instantly translated within the data room, thereby facilitating cross-border deals. These solutions were not developed with the goal of replacing manpower with automated data analysis. On the contrary, our goal is to empower deal experts by developing intuitive tools that don’t feel like a burden, but make their decision-making more accurate and their business lives more successful.