Ramon Richards, Chief Technology Officer, T. Rowe Price, tells Traders Magazine about digital transformation, tech trends and the firm’s capabilities in AI and machine learning.
What are the current tech trends in the asset management industry that define your work at T. Rowe Price?
Data is at the heart of what we do, and we are bringing data together across the enterprise to uncover insights, identify investment opportunities, and deliver a 360 view of our clients. Technology is also an important enabler for how we sustain our core capabilities and grow our client base globally: we are adopting a modern services architecture, implementing tools that improve quality and speed, investing in cybersecurity capabilities, and evaluating generative AI tools to increase productivity.
What’s your view on digital transformation and how do you embrace it at T. Rowe Price?
The digital future has arrived, resulting in new tools and capabilities enabling operational efficiencies and dynamic technology solutions. Digital transformation at T. Rowe Price is all about enhancing the customer experience and delivering investment excellence and worldclass service, which includes delivering personalized content, providing more self-service capabilities, automating manual processes, and digitizing paper-based processes, e.g., Robotic Process Automation (RPA). This is all delivered to our customers via a seamless, omni-channel experience across all devices.
How does T. Rowe Price adapt to new tools and frameworks available to operate natively in the cloud?
We have widely adopted cloud infrastructure to enable many of our business applications. One of the primary drivers for cloud applications is the ability to adopt and efficiently integrate new technologies. In addition, we incorporate privacy, resiliency, and security requirements early in our cloud development practice. We have set up sandbox environments that allow our engineers a place to innovate and explore. We run a weekly cloud expert group that provides a forum for our engineers to discuss new cloud services. Our certification process allows our engineers to onboard new services in a controlled manner ensuring that we only onboard services that align to our strategy and have the appropriate controls, shifting left, and building privacy, resilience, and security into our software practice up front.
What’s your use case for AI/ML applications? / How can AI/ML potentially impact the future of asset management?
T. Rowe has been developing capabilities in AI and machine learning for the past 7 years with our standup of the NYC Technology Development Center, creating solutions that generate data-driven insights for our investors, sales associates, and decision makers across the firm. These solutions range from custom investment factors, client propensity scores, and natural language processing (NLP) tools to enable consumption of corporate filings and earnings call transcripts. Starting in 2023, we have been developing Generative AI solutions to enable our investment analysts to use large language models (LLMs) for generating insights on proprietary research and integrating internal systems.
As technology rapidly evolves, system complexity increases exponentially; how do you keep up with operational resilience?
We have a sustained focus on enhancing our operational efficiencies and resiliency capabilities, while reducing system complexity, by adopting modernized technology capabilities and retiring legacy systems. Designing the business process, the necessary data flows, and the underlying technology in concert with each other is the key to achieving operational resilience.
What can we expect from T. Rowe Price on the technological front in the forthcoming months?
T. Rowe Price’s Technology organization continues to support our clients and partners through ongoing evolution of our technology footprint for enabling insights and efficient management of our assets. We remain committed to learning and exploring new areas like Generative AI in order to provide innovative and reliable solutions that enable our clients to achieve long-term results. We will also continue showing up in the marketplace as an employer of choice to attract and retain top tech talent. Our technologists play a critical role in propelling the firm’s progress by building the solutions, platforms, and experiences that our business partners rely on to move T. Rowe Price forward—and that help our clients achieve their financial goals.
