Camille Leblanc-Robichaud | 13 avril 2021
On April 13th, Poly-Monde had the opportunity to meet virtually with Samir Rath, CEO of Blue Fire AI. During this meeting, we discussed the role of artificial intelligence (AI) in the financial services sector and, more specifically, Singapore and Canadian markets. Through this video conférence, we addressed hot topics of the moment, such as the overall impact of the current pandemic in the financial sector of the city-state compared to Canada. Through the prism of Blue Fire AI's activities, we discussed the different strengths of the Canadian and Singaporean financial markets.
Samir Rath, born in Canada, worked and travelled around the world in numerous cities such as Chicago, New York, London and Singapore throughout his career. Trained as an electrical engineer specialized in integrated circuit design, his experience and studies brought him to the intersection of three fields: mathematics, data and hardware. After a few years as a macroeconomist at MAS and as a quantitative trader in a world-known financial trading firm, Samir Rath has acquired a strong background in scaling up startups, which he shares in a book called No Hipster Startup.
Our speaker’s actual position in Blue Fire AI, a pioneering Capital Markets Intelligence Firm in London, Toronto and Singapore, added depth to the analysis between Canada and Singapore Fintech’s markets.
As M. Rath explained during our meeting, Canada and Singapore both provide excellent regulatory environments in the financial services in data privacy and security fields. This allows both entities to perform well in the financial market but in entirely different sectors. Canada performs well in the retail industry of financial services, Fintech being more centred on payments, wealth management, and consumer lending. As a result, regulations tend to be more focused on personal data privacy. Singapore, being one of the world’s financial sectors, the regulation puts a big focus on data protection laws and data security. Ultimately, some similarities in both regulatory environments can be observed in the way of developing laws, as they are both aiming for transparency and oriented on collaboration between public, private sectors.
Discussion with our presenter brought up some of the significant challenges in integrating AI and algorithms in financial services. As AI integrates cognition and context to provide decision-making, one of the challenges is to provide proof of reliability and consistency of models. On that matter, Blue Fire AI is actively working with regulators to provide guidelines on using AI in risk management in a respectful way.
This meeting allowed the Poly-Monde committee access quality insights on the distinctions between the financial and Fintech ecosystems and regulatory environments provided by Canadian and Singapore governmental institutions while also approaching the challenges in view on those markets at the moment and in the following years to come.