BNY Mellon Pushes into Natural Language Generation

The Bank of New York Mellon is pushing into natural language generation (NLG) to help asset owners and managers develop insights from data.

The financial services company partnered with UK-based artificial intelligence (AI) company Arria to embed the language generating technology into its own internal data analytics platforms, called Eagle Performance and Data Management.

Instead of crunching tens of thousands of rows of data, a client using the interface can drop a data set into the interface to generate fully automated reports in seconds, according to a video describing the process.

“For business analysts, this is their new starting point for data analytics,” said Sharon Daniels, chief executive at Arria. “That gives people a massive competitive advantage.”

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Natural language generation, which distills data into written commentary, has been around for a while, and has been used by meteorologists to help them record weather phenomena and produce forecasts.

But a number of natural language generating companies have gained traction in recent years, including Narrative Science, which builds custom interfaces for clients, and Automated Insights.

The software promises to help financial services companies reduce the time spent on large volumes of data, as well as help them scale their data reporting operations.

“Even the best analyst could be missing some very important opportunities in the data that they just didn’t get to,” Daniels said. “And in the world of finance and portfolio analysts, lag time between reading data and taking action is key.”

Other companies, particularly newsrooms and financial services firms, are pushing into natural language generation, including accounting firms Deloitte and Ernst and Young.