Why Barclay’s FX salespeople should look over their shoulders
Artificial Intelligence marches ever onward. Anthropic’s AI safety researcher quit two days ago, warning of a world in peril, and musing his pursuit of a poetry degree. For some people, however, AI is just a way to make a buck or two.
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Enter Barclays’ recently launched AI chatbot, the awkwardly named BARXBot (come on - BarclAI was right there). “This tool delivers FX quotes 75% faster than the previous approach,” Barclays CEO C.S. Venkatakrishnan told analysts in the firm’s Q4 earning call yesterday.
That might be worrying. Electronification has been a big worry for traders for years – and salespeople thought they were much safer. If their work can be done 75% faster now, then they’re more at peril than they would like to admit. Back in 2024, Barclays itself said that “The hybrid nature of some asset classes… Makes them structurally more challenging to trade on a platform.” That might not be the case in the future.
BARXBot is just one part of Barclays’ suite of AI tools. Venkatakrishnan noted that the bank had more than 250 of them in total, which is on par with Bank of America’s suite of 270, and well behind both UBS’s and JPMorgan’s offerings. UBS alone has over 340 AI tools in active use.
Venkatakrishnan also said that the firm is “one of the largest users of Microsoft Copilot in the financial services industry,” whose adoption had saved over a million man-hours of work.
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