There was a time when banks and asset managers would dare not talk about their use of AI—and, specifically, machine learning—in public forums, as they either viewed it as taboo or they wanted to hide its power from competitors. The secret, though, is out of the black box.

The advent of the public cloud has made it easier to store huge amounts of data, which is necessary to run many forms of machine learning. Additionally, vast improvements in computing power has made it exponentially quicker to