Accelerated Computing Drives Milan Lender Forward

Financial institutions need a lot more than dollars in the vault these times, they also need to have accelerated computing in the back place.

“The improve we’re finding with GPUs not only appreciably improved our functionality at the same price tag, it served us redefine our company and sharpen our concentrate on shoppers,” said Marco Airoldi, who’s been head of money engineering for extra than 20 yrs at Mediobanca, a Milan-dependent banking group that supplies lending and expense companies in Europe.

High performance computing is primarily essential for financial investment banking companies whose solutions include computationally intensive transactions on baskets of securities and by-product products and solutions.

Many thanks, in portion, to its GPU-driven units, Mediobanca is thriving amid the recent sector downturn.

“We just cannot disclose numbers, but I can explain to you with a excellent degree of confidence I do not think we have had extra than a dozen negative times in the previous 250 trading times,” mentioned Stefano Dova, a Ph.D. in finance and head of marketplaces at Mediobanca.

That is, in section, mainly because Airoldi’s group enabled real-time chance management on GPUs early in the calendar year.

“It’s a fundamental phase forward,” claimed Dova, who plays his electrical piano or clarinet to unwind at the end of a tense day. “You can eliminate money on a daily foundation in the current current market volatility, but we’ve been quite content with the final results we’ve experienced in the previous 6 months.”

Sharing the Wealth

Now, Mediobanca is planning to provide its shoppers the same computing abilities it enjoys.

“Because the GPUs are so rapidly, we can supply shoppers the capacity to make their individual solutions and see their threat profiles in genuine time, so they can choose where and when to spend — you can only do this if you have the computational electricity for dwell pricing,” Dova stated.

The support, now in last testing, puts customers at the middle of the bank’s organization. It makes use of automation designed attainable by the parallel computing capabilities of the bank’s infrastructure, Airoldi notes.

Next Quit: Device Learning

Seeking even more forward, Airoldi’s group is mapping the investment decision bank’s journey into AI.

It starts with sentiment assessment, run by organic language processing. That will support the lender understand industry traits far more deeply, so it can make even much better expense selections.

“AI will give us helpful strategies to map client and investor behaviors, and we will invest in the technology to establish more AI apps for finance,” said Dova.

Mediobanca Milan uses GPUs
Mediobanca’s headquarters is in central Milan, all around the corner from the famed Teatro alla Scala.

Their get the job done will come as financial institutions of all sorts are setting up to implement AI to dozens of use conditions.

“AI is 1 of the most promising technologies in finance,” explained Airoldi, who foresees utilizing it for classical quantitative difficulties, too.

It is All About the Math

In the last handful of years, the lender has additional dozens of GPUs to its infrastructure. Each individual provides up to 100x the effectiveness of a CPU, he mentioned.

That indicates Mediobanca can do far more with a lot less. It decreases its overall cost of possession whilst accelerating workloads that produce aggressive strengths these kinds of as Monte Carlo simulations employed to make and price tag state-of-the-art expenditure goods.

Underneath the hood, wonderful fiscal efficiency is primarily based on excellence in math, stated Airoldi, who attained his Ph.D. in theoretical condensed make any difference physics.

“The mathematical designs and numeric methods of finance are carefully associated to people uncovered in theoretical physics, so investment banking is a wonderful job for a physicist,” he said.

When Airoldi wants a break from get the job done, you may locate him actively playing chess in the Piazza della Scala, throughout from the famed opera dwelling, just close to the corner from the bank’s headquarters.

- Advertisement -

Comments are closed.