QUESTIONS FOR Foteini Agrafioti

You are the Chief Science Officer at RBC and you also oversee its AI research institute. Describe the bank’s interest in this arena.

There are many aspects to our interest in AI. First of all, financial services is a very data-driven business. From the retail side to capital markets, we are making decisions based on data every single day — whenever we estimate risk, work on cases of fraud, or use cyber security models. So for us, it was a natural investment to bring state-of-the-art machine learning to the traditional statistical systems that have been in place in the financial sector forever. But this is about more than upgrading our statistical models: We want to figure out what banking will look like in the future, and how we can use artificial intelligence to enable that. So we created Borealis AI — an AI research institute within RBC where the mandate is to push the boundaries of science and develop intellectual property that will allow us to remain competitive for years to come.

It’s quite common to find groups like Borealis AI within tech companies, but it’s very unusual within the financial services sector. We have about a hundred employees, primarily scientists — Phds or Master’s in Machine Learning and Computer Science — doing both fundamental and applied research. For us, this was an obvious choice because we’re interested in using AI intellectual property as a competitive advantage for the future of our business.