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JPMorgan Chase wants to save bankers the time, headaches and intern-wrangling it takes to get the lowdown on other companies.
The financial institution is seeking to patent a system to "automatically discover and extract information" on public and private companies. Using what it calls an "artificial intelligence-based framework" that includes machine learning and natural language processing, the system essentially digs up all publicly available information on a company and aggregates it into one place.
First, a user tells the system what company they're interested in, and it accesses a well of public data on the company with what it calls a "recursive web crawling operation." The user can then pick from that well what data in particular they want, and the system displays information via a user interface.
This system can dig a little bit deeper on a company or employee than your average Google or LinkedIn search. Chase notes that this system can scrape for information related to individuals, products and companies as a whole, including number of employees, leadership, assets under management, social media and company policy information, specifically noting that it can find ESG information.
But given that patents often don't go into the full scope of possible uses, this system can likely extract even more than what Chase noted from the aforementioned "public data sources."
Frankly, it's not a super complex system, but Chase said it has the potential to help the institution make financial decisions about companies more easily, as currently, "there are huge challenges for collecting these data manually on a large scale that may approach millions of companies," it noted.
This filing adds to the abundance of AI tools we've seen come out of Chase's patent activity. The company is working on low- and no-code machine learning tech, an AI-based talent recruiting tool, and a matchmaking algorithm for companies and investors. The company also invested heavily in tech talent last year, and reportedly employs 1,500 engineers and data scientists.
In May, Chase filed for a trademark for a ChatGPT-esque AI investment advisor called IndexGPT. All the patent previews we've seen from the company in recent months may give us a sneak peak at how this IndexGPT tool could work.
Chase is definitely bullish on AI. In CEO Jamie Dimon's annual letter to shareholders, he noted that the company has more than 300 use cases for AI in practice. "AI and the raw material that feeds it, data, will be critical to our company's future success -- the importance of implementing new technologies simply cannot be overstated," he said in the letter.
Of course, the company could license this tech to other banks, or even industries beyond wall street, such as law, media, or anyone that wants easy access to information. But internally, talent often represents one of the biggest costs for financial firms. Chase could save some significant costs by automating due diligence, research and other tedious grunt work that bogs down Wall Street.
