Banks, insurers, and private equity service providers face numerous challenges.
Artificial intelligence – especially AI agents – promises relief.
Bilanz spoke with Manuel Grenacher, CEO and co-founder of Unique, a pioneer in AI solutions for financial service providers, about the latest developments – and gained insight into the vision of an AI-supported future.
“Our platform is designed to enable financial experts to use their data in combination with large language models (LLMs).”
– Manuel Grenacher, CEO and Co-Founder
Mr. Grenacher, the banking world is currently experiencing a hype around artificial intelligence. How do you assess this development?
The initial mega-hype has subsided, and we are now entering a phase of concrete implementation, which I view positively.
In the financial industry, active measures are being taken — and for good reasons:
Many institutions are struggling to maintain a healthy cost-income ratio, competition is immense, and there is a general pressure for efficiency throughout the entire industry.
Which aspects of the finance, insurance, and private equity industries do you see as most strongly transformed — and potentially improved — by AI?
The potential is enormous and extends across numerous core areas.
Processes such as customer onboarding, KYC procedures (Know Your Customer), and due diligence — which often require reviewing and analyzing large volumes of documents — are especially predestined for the use of AI models.
Here, it is essential to ensure that model developers do not learn from the sensitive data of financial institutions.
In addition, significant new opportunities arise in the generation of investment insights and in research, for example for portfolio optimization.
A central aspect of Unique’s work is the support of advisors to enable an even more qualified and efficient customer service — a clear win-win situation.
You address it directly: the use of AI in the financial services sector comes with considerable responsibility regarding data protection and ethics.
This is an unshakable fact and touches on a core value of Unique:
Our platform is designed to enable financial experts to use their data in combination with large language models (LLMs) — in a way that meets the highest security standards and has all relevant certifications.
Our independence from the major model developers is a decisive factor:
The models used through us are not capable of learning in the sense that data flows back to the original manufacturer.
We implement this consistently together with our partners so that insurers and financial institutions can use even highly sensitive data securely and in compliance.
This enables us to manage every use case securely and also ensures employee safety.
Another crucial advantage of our positioning is our exclusive focus on the financial sector.
What benefits result from this?
With now over 40 client institutions and more than 40,000 employees who use our AI tools daily,
we continuously gain deep insights into the most relevant and impactful use cases.
Based on this broad experience, we have developed an “AI Factory” as well as a comprehensive catalog of top use cases.
Our applications are largely “out of the box” functional.
When a potential client approaches us with specific challenges or “pain points,” we analyze them in detail, compare them with our proven solutions, and can thus very quickly demonstrate concrete benefits and optimization potential.