Global asset manager Franklin Templeton announced a collaboration this week with Microsoft to build an advanced financial artificial intelligence platform.
The new platform will consist of composable business applications, which, in the simplest terms, are built in a modular way and are intended to interact with each other from the start.
While the initiative is underway, it will likely be several quarters before the partnership begins to bear fruit, according to a Franklin Templeton spokesperson.
Franklin Templeton's sales and marketing teams will use the platform internally to increase efficiency and automation initially. Ultimately, it is likely that advisors and end clients will use the technology to search, analyze and compare the firm's products and research.
As Franklin Templeton's announcement explains, many organizations face the challenge of merging structured data with contextual financial information. This has often meant that both types of data and information remained hidden in the past. Part of the goal of this collaboration is to provide the ability to combine the two, and ultimately enable the delivery of richer “personalized experiences” at scale to Franklin Templeton's clients, whether institutions, advisors or clients. last.
Specifically, this new platform will be built using Microsoft Azure AI services, which include the Azure OpenAI Service and its GPT-4 large language model, as well as Azure AI Search and Azure AI Document Intelligence.
“The platform will use a multi-layered intelligence approach, where individual AI capabilities can be synchronized to create an advanced level of intelligence for our business,” said Deep Srivastav, head of AI for Franklin Templeton, in a statement. prepared.
In May 2022, Franklin Templeton participated in the Series D round of fintech developer TIFINwhich itself launched a specialized artificial intelligence development unit called TIFIN.AI in July 2023.
Many advisors are familiar with the all-in-one financial advisory technology platform AdvisorEngine, which Franklin Templeton was acquired in 2020but a company spokesman said the AI platform was being built separately from that business.
Technology collaboration is nothing new for the $1.6 trillion asset manager; in 2020 Franklin Templeton collaborated with Apex Clearing to build a white-label robo-advisor called Tangoand finally in 2021, worked with Vestwell 401(k) technology. AND acquired O'Shaughnessy Asset Management and its custom indexing platform, Canvas.