In a bit more than half a year, Danske Bank A/S has attracted 11,500 clients to an investment service provided by a robot. Denmark’s biggest financial firm now hopes the project will help it expand its wealth management operations.
The robot is called “June.” It targets retail clients and small businesses that normally would not have the resources to work out what to do with their surplus cash.
Because Denmark holds the world record in negative rates — the nation has been below zero since 2012, longer than any other place on Earth — the bank says that it makes sense to redirect deposits now earning nothing.
Customers encountering June for the first time are asked how much they want to invest — the limit is 1 million kroner (US$158,370) per person.
They then need to choose a risk category. If they are not sure, Danske provides a short test. That is followed by questions on a preferred investing time horizon, as well as income, spending, assets and liabilities.
Then June provides a recommendation on which of five funds to invest in, based on an algorithm. The whole process takes about 10 minutes.
“The idea with June is basically to help democratize investment,” Jakob Beck Thomsen, Danske’s product chief for June in Copenhagen, said in a telephone interview.
“More than half the people using June are below 40,” Thomsen said. “Normally, with our more conventional investing services, the average age is above 60.”
Clients are offered access to exchange-traded funds, with varying distributions of stocks and bonds, and different geographic spreads, depending on their risk appetite.
A lot of clients are now joining Danske via June, Thomsen said, adding that the robot “is not a job killer.”
“We’re basically looking to expand our wealth business and this is a complement to our existing business,” Thomsen added.
However, the kind of automation that June offers is set to spread throughout Danske.
Thomsen said that “in terms of the technology, a lot of the things you see in June, you’ll start seeing across other areas of the bank as well.”
BUSINESS UPDATE: The iPhone assembler said operations outlook is expected to show quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year growth for the second quarter Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) yesterday reported strong growth in sales last month, potentially raising expectations for iPhone sales while artificial intelligence (AI)-related business booms. The company, which assembles the majority of Apple Inc’s smartphones, reported a 19.03 percent rise in monthly sales to NT$510.9 billion (US$15.78 billion), from NT$429.22 billion in the same period last year. On a monthly basis, sales rose 14.16 percent, it said. The company in a statement said that last month’s revenue was a record-breaking April performance. Hon Hai, known also as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團), assembles most iPhones, but the company is diversifying its business to
Apple Inc has been developing a homegrown chip to run artificial intelligence (AI) tools in data centers, although it is unclear if the semiconductor would ever be deployed, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday. The effort would build on Apple’s previous efforts to make in-house chips, which run in its iPhones, Macs and other devices, according to the Journal, which cited unidentified people familiar with the matter. The server project is code-named ACDC (Apple Chips in Data Center) within the company, aiming to utilize Apple’s expertise in chip design for the company’s server infrastructure, the newspaper said. While this initiative has been
GlobalWafers Co (環球晶圓), the world’s No. 3 silicon wafer supplier, yesterday said that revenue would rise moderately in the second half of this year, driven primarily by robust demand for advanced wafers used in high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips, a key component of artificial intelligence (AI) technology. “The first quarter is the lowest point of this cycle. The second half will be better than the first for the whole semiconductor industry and for GlobalWafers,” chairwoman Doris Hsu (徐秀蘭) said during an online investors’ conference. “HBM would definitely be the key growth driver in the second half,” Hsu said. “That is our big hope
The consumer price index (CPI) last month eased to 1.95 percent, below the central bank’s 2 percent target, as food and entertainment cost increases decelerated, helped by stable egg prices, the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said yesterday. The slowdown bucked predictions by policymakers and academics that inflationary pressures would build up following double-digit electricity rate hikes on April 1. “The latest CPI data came after the cost of eating out and rent grew moderately amid mixed international raw material prices,” DGBAS official Tsao Chih-hung (曹志弘) told a news conference in Taipei. The central bank in March raised interest rates by