Raffy has worked in asset management for a little over a year. Charles calls him his technology wizard, while his most frequent tasks are password resets and installing security patches. Raffy takes coding classes and dreams of automating routines and landing a job on Wall Street. Meanwhile, he struggles with Charles.

—–

“I’ve heard horror stories about lack of security in these AI things.”

“We can use secure browsers and host the models on our own cloud.”

“I don’t trust the cloud. Anyone could hack into our information.”

“Amazon, Google and Microsoft spend a lot more on security than we can and they’re faster, more reliable and scalable than what we have.”

“They’ll just use our client data for advertising.”

“Nobody can access our client data.”

“I don’t see how. Anyway, I like what we do now. You do a great job keeping us safe.”

Raffy sighs. At least Peter understands. He wants dashboards to highlight data and use chatbots to communicate with clients about market trends. They just don’t have the time.

—–

Security on ChatGPT

ChatGPT is the leading language model. It’s created by OpenAI and backed by Microsoft. There are many alternatives and a world of artificial intelligence beyond text analysis, allowing image, video and audio data to be used to create commercial processes.

Publicly available language models should not be used by businesses. Conversations are not confidential and are stored for 30 days, even when you opt out of being used for training data.

Currently, your data won’t be sold but may be shared with affiliates vendors, service providers and law enforcement. Privacy policies do change and OpenAI’s is over 3,000 words and its terms of use more than 3,200. You need AI to keep a check on changes.

Secure Browser Environments

You may wall off your browser in a secure space, known as a sandbox. This is isolated from the underlying operating system. This protects you from malware, phishing and other threats at the cost of some loss of functionality.

There are various off-the-shelf secure browser environments commercially available. Be prepared to hear about containerization, virtualization and cryptographic code signing. These are ways of keeping the bad guys from your data.

Secure Cloud Architecture

Cloud infrastructure covers servers, storage, networks and applications. With more scope than a browser, a secure architecture protects against a wider range of threats. These include data breaches, unauthorized access and denial-of-service attacks. A secure cloud keeps more bad guys from your data.

Meanwhile you retain the advantages of using the cloud. Access to computing power is on demand, making it easy to scale up and pull back. This removes the need for capital investment and the cost of idle capacity, while providing maintenance and upgrades.

Cloud computing applications are faster to deploy and easier to share than those on in-house servers. This improves remote working and makes collaboration more effective. In turn, this enables a rapid respond to emerging security threats.

All the latest technology is built for the cloud and available there first. In businesses such as trade execution, where speed is of the essence, cloud computing is essential. You are exposed to the cloud whenever you trade your clients’ assets and you cannot shut yourself off from security risks.

Cloud providers have redundant capacity that gets you back online after hardware failures and deals with many disaster recovery requirements. They spend heavily on advanced security tools, threat detection and preventing intruders. Many businesses adopt the cloud purely for the peace of mind.

Interest Rates and Elections

Charles allowed Raffy to deploy the cloud last year. Now he’s on about using AI securely within the Azure environment. Charles trusts Microsoft as it’s the largest holding in his fund, but he’s too busy to worry about technology. He’s got all these clients asking him the same questions about interest rates and the impact of elections on markets.

If only there was a way to replicate himself and provide clients with instant access to his opinions.

Up Next: AI and Client Communications for Overstretched Fund Managers.