Emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and cloud have rapidly evolved and future potential remains powerful. Cryptocurrencies have bounced back following a sharp downturn, and there are reasons to be bullish.
Those were some of the topics covered on the From Cloud to Crypto: Innovation, Technology and Cybersecurity in Focus panel, a wide-ranging discussion Thursday afternoon at the Options Industry Conference in Nashville.
Tony Zhang, Chief Strategy Officer at OptionsPlay, said ten years ago, his firm had to hire students with “supercomputers” to deploy AI applications. Today, that can be done securely in the cloud.
Cloud has enabled OptionsPlay and its customers to reduce cost, add scale, and more easily interface with the largest financial institutions, Zhang said.
Andrej Bolkovic, Chief Executive Officer at OCC, discussed the Renaissance Initiative, his firm’s multi-year effort to redevelop and modernize its technology infrastructure, which includes moving its clearing, risk, and data applications to the cloud. Benefits will include resiliency, scalability, and flexibility.
Bolkovic contrasted the current technology with the start of his career in the 1990s, when mainframe computers and data centers were the mainstays.
eToro, a social investment community and trading platform, operates hybrid cloud, a mixed computing environment where applications are run using a combination of computing, storage, and services in different environments such as public clouds, private clouds and on-premises data centers.
Cloud enables “the ability to dynamically have more horsepower, more bandwidth at your disposal,” said Nick LaMaina, Global Head of Broker Dealer Solutions, eToro. “You don’t have to source hardware, or have it cabled,” or manage other such complexities.
Still, panelists noted that there are use cases such as high frequency trading or low latency, where a firm may want a level of control that the cloud doesn’t allow for.
Regarding AI, LaMaina said eToro CEO Yoni Assia is a strong proponent of AI and how it can revolutionize financial services. “He has challenged us as a company to incorporate AI into our workflows” and to “help us better analyze and predict what customers want.”
Similarly, Zhang said OptionsPlay has “almost mandated” everyone in the firm to look for AI tools that will advance the business. Zhang said AI may be more useful in areas such as marketing and finance rather than trading, and he estimated that generative AI makes subject matter experts three to ten times more effective, while it can make someone who doesn’t know anything mediocre in a given field.
Lastly, panelists touched on crypto, which has improved this year both in terms of the price of bitcoin and trading activity.
eToro aims to enable customers to trade any asset, including crypto. “There are lots of changes in regulation and oversight coming,” LaMaina said. “I am still bullish on the prospects for the industry.
OptionsPlay doesn’t offer crypto trading but it is “crypto adjacent,” Zhang said, adding that he personally owns crypto as a long-term hedge position.
