“Many People Probably Do Not Understand What AI Is”: Acuity Trading’s CEO

“Companies are saying that they are artificial intelligence (AI) friendly, but the word AI has a lot to it,” said Andrew Lane, founder and CEO of Acuity Trading, highlighting the trend as “AIwashing.”

Lane compared the term “AIwashing” with “greenwashing,” which was the rush for companies to show how environmentally friendly they are to score sustainability points among investors, but in reality, they were not. The scale and impact of greenwashing even forced regulators to jump in.

“There is a lot to the word AI,” Lane said, adding, “I understand it more in terms of machine learning. The number of people saying, ‘Oh, we have AI and our product is AI this,’ and they probably don't even understand what AI is.”

“Extracting Information from the Text in an Automated Way”

Lane founded Acuity in 2013, a company that provides traders with data and market information using machine learning and natural language processing. Before Acuity, he was employed at Dow Jones, where he worked on natural language processing at an early stage and was also involved in natural language generation.

“It's extracting information from the text in an automated way and turning that into numbers,” he explained. “The positivity the companies mentioned, the geographies they mentioned, all this data gets extracted from texts and put into numbers, and then hedge funds could trade off this data.”

“We started off with a very small product at Acuity 10 years ago, which was providing sentiment analysis to retail traders in the form of visuals,” Lane said. “Nowadays, we've advanced a lot further. So we still do the NLP at the core of what we do, but we extract a lot more information from the internet from texts, press releases, broker releases and lots of information you can find from news stories.”

“Our most recent innovation is merging our technical analysis with sentiment analysis. NLP is often known as sentiment—the sentiment of the news, the positivity and negativity in the news. We also have a technical analysis product under a regulated company. We are the first company to be able to merge the two.”

“We Are Sort of Mini-Bloomberg”

Explaining Acuity’s core customers, Lane said that “we work with brokers in a white label fashion,” adding: “They take our tools, they put them on their trading platform, and they offer it to their traders to stimulate and make them more confident in trading.”

“We are sort of mini-Bloomberg,” he added. “We have a research terminal that provides lots and lots of different information points for any trader of any level or sophistication. And so, in that sense, any trader could access our information, whether an FX, crypto, equity trader or an investor versus the trader. But still, now we have a heavy focus on trading rather than investing without a change.”

“My next step is to move more into longer-term investing, away from just traders,” Lane continued. “I think there has been a need for brokers to attract investors as well as traders for a long time, and we want to match our products to those.”