The Scoop
Palantir Technologies is targeting the global financial services industry as the next big market for its artificial intelligence tools, joining the CEO of Guggenheim Partners and the former owner of Legendary Entertainment to persuade banks and asset managers to take a new, “holistic” approach to AI spending.
The data analytics group founded by Peter Thiel announced a joint venture on Wednesday with TWG Global, which invests the fortunes of billionaires Mark Walter and Thomas Tull. The new initiative will “redefine AI deployment” across the industry, the partners said in a statement.
Their pitch is that financial institutions can tap Palantir’s technical expertise and TWG’s operational knowledge to take a more comprehensive approach to their use of AI, rather than buying separate products from multiple vendors.
Walter’s interests range from Guggenheim Securities to Chelsea Football Club and the Los Angeles Dodgers, while Tull, whose productions at Legendary included Jurassic Park and Batman Begins, has invested in the New York Yankees and Cadillac’s F1 team. The two men have been working together for the past couple of years, Tull told Semafor, and recently hired Drew Cukor, who led the Pentagon’s Project Maven AI program before joining JPMorgan Chase as the bank’s head of AI transformation.
“We’re at the very beginning of what will be a pretty seismic shift when artificial intelligence truly runs a lot of systems,” Tull said in an interview. “We’re certainly not foolish or arrogant enough to think that we’re the only ones working on this, but we do believe that, with what we’ve built plus what Palantir brings to the table, we’ll be able to move very quickly,” he said.
Tull gave no details of the venture’s funding or revenue goals, but added that the partners have been encouraged by the demand it has seen from well-known firms.
Know More
The financial services industry represents one of the most valuable targets for any technology supplier. And its members, with their large data sets, are promising candidates for the application of AI in areas from fraud prevention to the processing of legal documentation.
At the same time, financial services providers have had to juggle privacy and cybersecurity concerns while operating within a fragmented regulatory environment and managing complex technology systems built up over decades of consolidation.
Industry members have been adding to that complexity by giving large numbers of different AI vendors access to their data, Cukor said.
“Do you really want to manage 300 separate [vendors] that are all using your data in different ways?” he asked, predicting that the current approach would end in “a real disaster.”
Palantir has already been building its financial services customer base, announcing the deployment of its anti-financial crimes technology with Société Générale this week. It told analysts on its earnings call last month it viewed AI as a means to “the self-driving company.”