AFTAs 2019: Most Cutting-Edge IT Initiative—Bank of America

In September 2018, Bank of America quietly rolled out a new tool dubbed PRIAM, short for Predictive Intelligence Analytics Machine. The internally built product—which won the AFTA for the most cutting-edge IT initiative—was created in large part because business workflow around how IPOs are launched in the market had not changed in decades, says David Reilly, global banking and markets CIO for the bank.

The process traditionally relies on a mix of industry and domain expertise, relationships with investors, and analysis to know which deal to bring to which investor. PRIAM uses artificial intelligence to better run those analytics by taking a swath of historical and current marketplace information to provide bankers with additional insight based on advanced statistical analysis to complement the banker’s expertise. Through this mix of analytics and human expertise, Reilly says, bankers can find incremental demand for transactions and achieve better execution for clients.    

 “BofA PRIAM is a game-changer for us,” he says. “The model predicts not only the most likely institutional buyers to participate in a deal, but more unique ‘high-signal’ investors, which helps find additional demand for our clients’ transactions. Since its rollout in September 2018, it has had 70%-plus prediction accuracy, meaning that of the 30 top predicted investors, more than 70% of them participated in the transaction.”

PRIAM is currently being deployed in EMEA and the US and will be later rolled out in Asia. It also has the potential to scale to other products and asset classes. “We believe there is huge potential for BofA PRIAM and we’ll be working on how we can extend the technology to other asset classes in 2020,” Reilly says.

The last four winners of this award were TIAA (2018), JP Morgan Asset & Wealth Management (2017), and Credit Suisse and Blackstone (2016, sell side and buy side).