Deutsche Bank powers new banking apps with Nvidia AI acceleration

Deutsche Bank is looking to deploy artificial intelligence (AI) acceleration technology from Nvidia to power financial services applications.

The bank hopes AI will improve its efforts to serve customers worldwide and enable it to build new data-driven products and services, increase efficiency and recruit tech talent.

Using Nvidia AI Enterprise software, Deutsche Bank said its AI developers, data scientists and IT professionals would be able to build and run AI workflows in hosted on-premise datacentres as well as on Google Cloud, which the bank uses as its public cloud provider.

The bank plans to use the latest version of Nvidia’s enterprise AI tool – AI Enterprise 3.0. This introduces workflows for contact centre intelligent virtual assistants, audio transcription and digital fingerprinting for cyber security.

Pricing is one of the new application areas for AI at Deutsche Bank. Traditionally, price discovery, risk valuation and model back testing applications require computationally intensive calculations that need to be run on traditional CPU-driven server grid farms.

Nvidia said accelerating this workload offers a way for the bank to deliver more accurate results in real time, helping it provide more value to customers while lowering total costs by as much as 80%: “Many bank functions that typically process overnight, like risk valuation, can now be run in real time on accelerated compute.”

According to Deutsche Bank, this represents a leap forward in how traders can manage risk by running more scenarios faster on a more energy-efficient grid farm.

The bank is also looking at how Nvidia technology can support its plans for the metaverse. Deutsche Bank is exploring how to engage employees, potential recruits and customers more interactively, improving experiences using 3D virtual avatars in real time, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. An early potential implementation enabled Deutsche Bank to create a 3D virtual avatar to help employees navigate internal systems and respond to HR-related questions. Future use cases will explore immersive metaverse experiences with banking clients.

A third application area for the Nvidia technology is when AI is used to discover insights from unstructured data. According to Nvidia, existing large language models for text analysis do not perform well on financial texts. However, by using “transformers”, a type of neural network that learns context, Nvidia said a single pre-trained model forms the basis of a new generation of AI.

Deutsche Bank and Nvidia plan to test a collection of large language models called Financial Transformers, or Finformers, which they say have the potential to provide early warning signs of counterparty risk, retrieve data faster and identify data quality issues.

“AI and machine learning will redefine banking, and we’re already working closely with Nvidia to lead the industry in leveraging these technologies to improve customer service and mitigate risk,” said Gil Perez, chief innovation officer and head of cloud and innovation network at Deutsche Bank.

“Accelerated computing enables traders to manage risk and run more scenarios faster while also improving energy efficiency, and Nvidia AI Enterprise provides the flexibility to support AI development across our hybrid infrastructure.”