I will be speaking at the 2018 Money 20/20 Conference. Why would this conference want someone like me who understands how to create machine learning systems but isn’t an expert (by any means) in finance? And why would I accept the invitation? Let me cut to the chase and say I’m excited about this event and I suggest you consider attending too. See https://us.money2020.com/

The Money 2018 20/20 Conference will be held October 21-24 in Las Vegas. There will be well over 10,000 attendees. Companies that will be represented include financial companies such as Morgan Stanley, Lloyds Bank, Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, as well as technology companies such as Google, Facebook, IBM, and Amazon.

The point is that machine learning is very simple: making predictions using data. Financial companies have always been on the leading edge of quantitative methods, because there’s huge amounts of money involved.

Not by coincidence, I have been involved with several projects that used machine learning for finance related problems. The results have been quite remarkable — using the latest deep neural techniques, I’ve seen a direct impact of many millions of dollars, in both increased revenue and decreased expense. And these projects didn’t require a lot of time (typically about 12 weeks end-to-end) or resources (typically 3 to 5 people).

The real key to the success of these ML + finance projects was knowing what techniques are available. For example, one project applied a deep LSTM network to the analysis of financial contracts and within weeks had created a ML system that was put into production with an estimated impact of $20 million annually.

At the start of the project, the team members didn’t have a solid understanding what LSTMs could do but when I gave a lecture, including complete code for a sample problem, the team instantly grasped the ideas and knew how to apply and LSTM to their work scenario.

I’m looking forward to this conference. Even though I’m quite certain the company I work for is one of the absolute leaders in applied machine learning, I expect to learn a lot, mostly about what other companies are doing. This will certainly help me do my job better, and possibly give me an idea or two for new ways to apply machine learning to finance problems. If you attend Money 20/20 be sure to find me and say “hello”.

Left: Lloyd’s Bank, established in 1765. Right: Connection between love and money, established roughly 10,000 years ago.