On May 5, Anthropic released 10 financial services agents. The company said they "pair best" with Claude Opus 4.7, a "state-of-the-art" model that leads the industry on financial agent benchmarks. And the hype followed. The media called the agents a threat to Wall Street.
The reality is more complicated.
In today’s episode of Zero Shot, hosts Brady Ng and Praveen Gopal Krishnan are joined by Musheer Ahmed, founder of FinStep Asia and ex-trader, and Sharath Chandra, founder of EmpowerEdge Ventures, to make sense of what actually changed.
The conversation covers why financial services keeps attracting AI investment, why the 10 agents are more useful to junior analysts than to the industry at large, and why trust remains the real bottleneck in finance. They also get into data residency, the regulatory moat protecting incumbent banks, and what happens to a service like the Bloomberg terminal.
Tune in!
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This episode was produced by Vidhatri Rao and edited by Rajiv CN.
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Zeus, the mascot of Zero Shot, was generated using AI. Everything else is made by humans, just like all articles, columns, newsletters, and other podcasts created by The Ken.
Write to us at Zeroshot@the-ken.com. We are all ears!
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Additional Resources
Who watches the AI watching your money?
https://the-ken.com/kaching/who-watches-the-ai-watching-your-money/
Anthropic releases new AI agents for financial services firms
https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/anthropic-releases-new-ai-agents-for-financial-services-firms-e2829b37
Anthropic unveils AI agents for financial services tasks
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3RLgeUiUXY
AI for financial services
https://www.anthropic.com/news/finance-agents
