Building The Bionic Banker with AI

• The Bionic Banker is a term we use to describe an AI-assisted banker whose talents are both supplemented where needed and amplified through our personalized AI engine. 
• ModuleQ’s Unprompted AI delivers hyper-personalized information directly in banker workflows. 
• Tools such as our Pre-Meeting, New Mandate, and Equity Research Alerts assist bankers by saving their time during hectic business trips, helping them find new revenue-generating opportunities, while intelligently integrating powerful market data to keep them abreast of important trends. 
• This shift to AI-assisted investment banking is necessary in a new era of talent competition. 

In a prior piece, we discussed how investment banks leverage ModuleQ’s Unprompted AI to improve their efficiency ratios. They do this by making their bankers more productive, leading to greater revenue generation opportunities. How exactly does Unprompted AI do this? By augmenting bankers with the type of information that increases productivity while addressing through-put challenges; what Boston Consulting Group has coined as the “Bionic Banker.” 

Harnessing AI to Create the Bionic Banker 

What is the Bionic Banker? Colloquially speaking, an individual whose personal skill set is supplemented by additive technology. ModuleQ aims to create the bionic banker by addressing the specific challenges that many bankers face. In doing so, a greater swath of talented, tenured bankers can increase their production, getting more out of the bank’s talent funnel, and rewriting the bank’s talent equation. This increases average tenure, improves the organization’s tacit knowledge, and ultimately its return on investment. 

How does Unprompted AI do this? By delivering the right insight to the right banker without interrupting them from their busy workflow. Simply delivering helpful alerts, content, market data, and suggestions can expand the purview of bankers’ revenue-generating opportunities. 

Enhancing Efficiency with Pre-Meeting Alerts 

ModuleQ improves the efficiency of each banker’s workflow through tools such as Pre-Meeting Alerts. Pre-Meeting Alerts deliver concise and informative summaries for bankers before meetings. They are powered by internal data the bank maintains on a target company: from prior meeting notes in a CRM to market data about their capital structure or business needs. Alerts are sent using a mixture of event triggers and a regular cadence built for individual workflows (and calendar). Pre-Meeting Alerts reduce the prep time for bankers (who are hard-pressed to log in to systems to cobble together this valuable information) while increasing internal information usability and accessibility.   

These alerts are especially useful during busy trips or for bankers who struggle with task prioritization and information overload. These individuals often thrive with deep work but are shoehorned to produce in ways that may not fit their strengths. 

Staying Informed with Personalized Alerts 

For years, alerts have been sold to banks as a solution for workers who want to stay informed on important market trends or thresholds. However, filtering these alerts was nearly impossible to calibrate correctly. The result was either a barrage of emails filled with irrelevant information or generic information that was blatantly market-moving. 

ModuleQ’s Unprompted AI uses patented Personal Data Fusion Technology to fine-tune alerts to each individual user. It doesn’t attempt to have an AI omnisciently pick and choose what information is most relevant when serving up an alert. It leverages rules-based systems mixed with the personalization tools we specialize in to ensure specificity and relevance aren’t lost. The result is alerts that are informative, relevant, and time-saving. 

For example, let’s say a banker is on a trip to a city and would like to be notified of prospective companies headquartered in the area that have impending debt maturities. This notification would provide high-quality prospects for a bank to meet, saving valuable time versus a CRM and data-terminal query. It requires a few rules, integration with the banker’s calendar, and an understanding of their coverage areas and focus. At ModuleQ, we play at the intersection of these datasets and worker profiles. This is the benefit of a personalized AI approach. 

Another example would be an alert when the 10-year US Treasury trades within a band, connected to prospective leads who have long-dated debts (within one’s coverage area) that could thus benefit from the availability of refinancing. To do this, the AI doesn’t have to be able to write Shakespeare; the tool must accurately connect disparate systems such as internal deal pipelines with market data and capital structures to provide relevant insights at the right time. What previously took crafty investigative work by sharp bankers (and a lot of their time) can now be an update sent directly to a banker’s Microsoft Teams environment. This is the promise of Unprompted AI. 

The Need for Transformation in Investment Banking 

Investment banking enjoyed a period in the early to mid-2000s where the best and brightest viewed it as the ideal career trajectory. There was an attractive allure to banking just as the industry was undergoing a secular shift of consolidation and globalization. This generational inflow of talent gave banks the luxury to simply collect as many bright minds and find ways to make use of their talents down the line. 

As investment banks are becoming more specialized and as their proprietary risk-taking has changed in a post-Dodd-Frank (and impending Basel Endgame) world, that flexibility is diminished. Bright young graduates have competition from technology-focused fields such as AI, while other financial services firms such as private equity continue to build their own competitive talent funnels directly into college campuses. All of this is to say that the talent equation of Investment Banking 2.0 will not necessarily translate into the era of Investment Banking 3.0.  

Banks must adapt and make the most of a different talent funnel. They must rewrite their talent equation to drive better efficiency ratios and competitive ability. Tools such as ModuleQ’s Unprompted AI are tailor-made to drive revenue generation, helping banks get more from their talent while successfully navigating this transition.