HSBC partners with AI developers to upgrade equity investment

In a somewhat unusual partnership, top bank HSBC and tech developers IBM Watson and EquBot have joined forces to launch the first equity index products that are using AI as their backbone. Dubbed the AI Powered US Equity Index (AiPEX), the product will rely heavily on AI in order to handle and compile data pertaining to equity.

The AI is meant to clue investors in on opportunities

HSBC’s AiPEX product will use the two tech companies’ AI solutions to analyze giant streams of data on a real-time basis. The bank’s AI will scour the web for various points that could be relevant to AiPEX, ranging from announcements and tweets to less-obvious pieces such as changing satellite images and the like.

Dave Odenath, HSBC’s head of quantitative investment solutions for Global Banking and Markets, expanded upon the bank’s choice to utilize AI instead of analysts to assess an individual company. Odenath said that the increasing amount of information pertaining to a certain company has created a need for alternative measures of assessing it. The AI being used for AiPEX will constantly analyze the 1,000 largest publicly-traded companies in the U.S. and look for shifts that could represent entry points. The bank hopes that this approach will give investors a heads-up and alert them to potential growth of a company’s stock much sooner than would otherwise be the case.