AITrading: meet our advisors!
We are starting a new section in our blog, featuring four outstanding individuals, who have worked alongside us and behind the scene to offer you a state-of-the art product but also to develop an investor-ready business case.
Today, we invite you to meet Pierre-Alexandre Greil, a high-caliber Big Four-trained French financier, who has spent a decade in the City of London advising on corporate finance, M&A and economic issues, mostly in the infrastructure and digital sectors.
His most recent project was with Payments UK, advising on the economic case for a digital decentralized overhaul of the UK payments architecture. He is a member of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Scotland as well as a graduate from the famous London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and from Sciences-Po, an elite French college in Paris.
We asked Pierre a few questions to get his perspective on our platform and the industry overall.
What is important for traders but also for the general public to learn about AI-assisted trading?
Artificial intelligence is a kind of a buzzword these days and fintech is starting, slowly but surely, to become a crowded space for young entrepreneurs. The alliance of the two is attractive as a business proposition, not only because algorithmic trading has already transformed the way financial markets operate over the past decade or so but also because its benefits have been shared insufficiently with the growing retail investor and amateur trading population. If anything, it has increased information asymmetry between big market-makers and retail investors who are typically implementing trading ideas suggested by commentators and institutions with an agenda and are often getting “slaughtered” as a result. In my view, there is a big reservoir of market inefficiencies waiting to be addressed, provided we adapt our offer to the needs of a vast addressable market, who does not have time to acquire sophisticated trading knowledge but should have a fighting chance in the market, instead of being just there to provide liquidity to market-making institutions.
What is so unique about the project on your perspective?
Contributing to correcting these inefficiencies and provide a level playing field to trading markets is exactly the purpose of AITrading and their ethos is what attracted me first to the project.
But AITrading is not just for beginners. It also has a lot to offer to more experienced traders or to finance professionals who get the opportunity either to widen their intellectual trading horizons or to pitch their services in a more practical fashion to this new market of investors, without falling into the trap of being “everything to everyone”.
And as we say in France, “il n’est de richesses que d’hommes”. In English that can be roughly translated as “the only wealth is about mankind”. The AITrading project team is one of the most impressive and complementary collection of individuals I have seen for a long-time, most if not all coming from impressive academic (Ivy League) or professional backgrounds (McKinsey, Big 4 etc…). Their knowledge of the market coupled to their understanding of what AI is from a scientific point of view is just baffling. These guys truly know what they are doing. In my personal opinion, they are an investor’s dream to work with.
How do you see the perspective of development of the industry (AI+ML in trading powered by blockchain)?
We live in transformative times for the fintech industry. There is a lot of liquidity to invest out there and many of entrepreneurs are called to contribute to disruption but few will ultimately be chosen by market forces, a bit like in the 90’s and the “dotcom” era, hence the importance to invest in the right people early on.
From a technology perspective, blockchain is called to play a central role on the infrastructure and will become the new transactional norm in a not-so-distant future. As for AI, it will succeed on the basis of more and more sophisticated, Big-Data based, machine-learning mechanisms but as I said earlier, the danger is for it to become a factor for further inequality between “insiders” and “outsiders” on financial markets. The outcome is being decided as we speak and entrepreneurs like Alexey are part of the solution.
We thank Pierre-Alexandre for such a detailed interview.
Meet our advisors at https://aitrading.com
