The Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) has announced its partnership with Cohere to develop and secure the deployment of North for Banking, a generative AI (genAI) solution designed for financial services.
“RBC is on a path to redefine what a bank is capable of, and AI will play an important role in our future success,” said Foteini Agrafioti, senior vice president of RBC Borealis and chief science officer of RBC, in a news release.
The planned solution seeks to integrate with RBC's internal platforms and with the proprietary foundation models of both RBC and Cohere, a provider of enterprise AI focused on security and privacy.
“With its globally recognized enterprise AI expertise, Cohere is an ideal partner for us as we build upon almost a decade of AI investment and a strong commitment to responsible AI principles to continue to innovate and harness the potential of genAI with our clients' safety and security at the forefront,” Agrafioti said in the news release.
“Cohere is unique among its commercial peers in providing the level of flexibility and collaboration that we need to take the next step in our AI journey and increase productivity across the enterprise,” Agrafioti added in the news release.
“We're excited to work with RBC to co-develop North for Banking, a customized version of our new secure AI workspace platform for the financial services industry,” said Ivan Zhang, Cohere’s co-founder.
Through their collaboration, RBC and Cohere said they aim to speed up the development of genAI solutions at RBC while ensuring efficiency and security.
“We are already seeing the positive impact of genAI technology in applications we've put into production, including in our advice centre, where we are using this technology internally to support advisors to answer client questions faster and with greater detail, and in our Capital Markets business, where it's used to enhance productivity and streamline workflows of research analysts,” Agrafioti said in the news release.
The partnership between RBC and Cohere is expected to assist in the design of more accurate and verifiable models and ensure a focus on risk and security features to improve the protection of companies within the financial services industry.
“North for Banking will be an end-to-end AI solution that financial industry firms can seamlessly integrate to increase workforce productivity and operational efficiency,” Zhang said in the news release. “By prioritizing security and data privacy protections, companies can have peace of mind as they deploy it internally at scale.”
“We look forward to exploring deployment of this solution in various use cases over the next several months,” Agrafioti added in the news release.