News & Events
Highlights of the Symposium on Risk Management and Business Intelligence 2019
The Symposium of Risk Management and Business Intelligence 2019 was held on 23 March 2019. It is a valuable platform for industry professionals to exchange ideas and gain insights and students to acquire a better understanding of new trends. This year the topic of the symposium was FinTech, which covered innovations in this field and industry outlook.
The 2019 symposium commenced with opening remarks by Professor King L. Chow, Director of Interdisciplinary Programs Office. He highlighted the recent trends in the FinTech industry and encouraged RMBI students to utilize the skills learned from the risk management and business intelligence aspects to find the opportunities in the market.
Professor Raymond C.W. Wong, Director of RMBI Program, also gave a welcome speech. He focused on the current technology development in data handling of text, picture, audio, etc., and briefly introduced a few FinTech applications in the market. Souvenirs were presented to the Guests of honor as appreciation for their contributions to the 2019 symposium.
The first session entitled “FinTech Innovation: Strategies & Execution”, was by Dr. Albert Lam, Chief Scientist and Acting Chief Technology Officer of Fano Labs. His topic was “Speech and Natural Language Processing Technology for Chinese Dialects”. He addressed the importance of speech recognition and natural language processing (NLP) in the Chinese context and suggested several applications using these technologies. In particular, he introduced AccoBot, which is an artificial intelligence customer service system using automatic speech recognition and NLP technologies. Next was Callinter, an artificial intelligence speech analytics system, which is transforming call centers from human operated to AI controlled. The last case was the Incident Management System (IMS) which incorporates AI driven automation and speech analytics. IMS was deemed to be extremely useful in the prediction of incidents and alert notifications. Finally, he added that the development of data labeling and briefly explained how the suggested solutions could be utilized in different industries such as banking, telecom, government, etc.
The FinTech Innovation session continued with the second speaker, Mr. Jason Tu, Co-Founder and CEO of MioTech. His talk, “An Overview of AI Applications on Financial Data”, covered NLP and knowledge graph applications in Finance. He began by pointing out the current problems of the lack of data coverage on Asian markets and inadequate utilization of advanced technology in financial industries. There were also technical difficulties in named entity recognition, topic modeling and interdependent data handling, which triggered the emergence of domain-specific AI in Asian financial markets. Mr. Tu demonstrated the concept behind the how knowledge graph and NLP for event extraction to help solve problems. He also gave figures on the success of MioTech’s application on the knowledge graph.
Mr. Jacob Wai, Chief Risk Officer and Chief Data Officer at MoneySQ, delivered an insightful talk entitled “Innovations in Data & Analytics for Financial Risk Management in FinTech”. He defined some fundamental concepts of FinTech and international landscape to deepen the audience’s understanding. Technologies were implicated in risk management in terms of market, credit risk and operational risk. Robo-advisor machine learning was introduced as one of the approaches to manage these risks. Algorithms respond to the data in a feedback loop, which could be used in behavioral finance such as supervised training in cognitive dissonance and loss aversion models. He closed his presentation with a discussion on data analytics in InsurTech development.
The last part of session 1 on FinTech Innovation was the sharing by Ms. Kelly Zou, Territory Manager of China VRC at WorldQuant. It was about “Alpha Strategies on WebSim”. Alpha is a measure to evaluate the performance of different financial instruments, tracking their buy and sell signals. Ms. Zou discussed some of the benefits of using data mining techniques to find alpha. This first was that data processing could be improved when the system could deal with different types of data such as news, social media, and analyst reports. Then alpha signals could be more accurately predicted using different data mining techniques and analytics models. Back-testing of the alpha signals using a series of performance indicators also could be boosted with computer systems. She ended her presentation with some future development insights into alpha-making techniques.
The 2nd session of the 2019 symposium was “FinTech Outlook: Opportunities & Challenges”. Mr. Nelson Chow, Chief FinTech Officer of FinTech Facilitation Office, Hong Kong Monetary Authority, deliberated on FinTech development from the view of the government. According to Mr. Chow, FinTech played a role in payment, asset management, financing and insurance in Hong Kong. He reviewed the emergence of different technology firms and gave his views on the regulatory implications in three areas: artificial intelligence, block chain, and cloud computing. He also assessed Hong Kong’s performance in FinTech in terms of capital, demand, infrastructure, talent, and policy. Overall, he thought that Hong Kong had a favorable environment for the development of FinTech. He also discussed HKMA’s role and FinTech initiatives in research, industry liaison, regulatory, talent development and cross-border collaboration.
Dr. Qun Liu, Chief Scientist of Speech and Language Computing at Huawei Noah’s Ark Lab, gave a talk on “Dialog Systems: Advances in Research and Application”. He compared a Chatbot of a dialog system and online ordering system using graphic user interface (GUI) to outline the benefits of a dialog system. He also gave examples of commercial chatbots and demonstrated how knowledge graph could be embedded into a dialog system. For example, if users input keywords of specific products, the product menu would automatically appear. He also analyzed the importance of the dialog manager to track the dialog states like the type of the request, the target of the request, etc. Dialog systems could be grouped into two different approaches: chitchat and task-oriented, both of which were driven by technologies such as template based, deep learning and machine learning. The next part of Dr. Liu’s speech concentrated on the applications of the dialog system in the finance field. It improved user experience in real-time access to bank accounts, spending insights, expense tracking, budgeting, micro investments, tailored financial recommendations, smart savings, payments and money transfers. He concluded with a failed example of the dialog system to illustrate the challenges facing this technology.
The last session of the 2019 symposium was a panel discussion facilitated by Professor Raymond Wong. This year the panelists exchanged ideas on the FinTech challenges facing by business and authorities. Mr. Nelson Chow pointed out one challenge on balancing between user experience and product function. Dr. Qun Liu specified the potential problems on chatbots like accuracy problem, data privacy, and security problems. Dr. Albert Lam expressed his reservations about issuing banking licenses to virtual banks and cybersecurity problems. Also, KYC was one of the main challenges in the risks of illegal intentions and speaker verification. To overcome the challenges, Mr. Jason Tu suggested that technology startup should develop innovative products and carefully examine the market to ensure the products fit the buyers’ needs. Mr. Jacob Wai cautioned that startups should carefully develop their business models, taking into account financing and the needs of users to make sure it was attractive to investors.
Overall, the RMBI 2019 symposium has been a success and valuable platform for experts to exchange ideas. It was also extremely helpful for RMBI students to develop a clearer picture of what the markets were heading and be more prepared for their future career.
Lau Ching Yan Cecilia, Year 4 in Risk Management and Business Intelligence (Class of 2019)