Global asset manager Franklin Templeton announced a collaboration this week with Microsoft to build an advanced financial artificial intelligence platform.
The new platform will be made up of composable business applications, which, in simplest terms, are built in a modular fashion and meant to interoperate with one another from the start.
While the initiative is underway, it will likely be a couple of quarters before the partnership begins to bear fruit, according to a Franklin Templeton spokesperson.
Franklin Templeton’s sales and marketing teams will use the platform internally to boost efficiency and automation initially. Down the road, it is likely advisors and end clients will use the technology to search, analyze, and compare the firm’s products and research.
As explained in the Franklin Templeton announcement, many organizations face the challenge of merging structured data with contextual financial information. This has often meant that the two types of data and information remained siloed in the past. Part of the aim of this collaboration is to provide the ability to combine the two, and ultimately, enable delivery of richer "personalized experiences" at scale for Franklin Templeton clients, whether institutions, advisors or end-clients.
Specifically, this new platform will be built using Microsoft Azure AI services, which include Azure OpenAI Service and its GPT-4 large language model, as well as Azure AI Search and Azure AI Document Intelligence.
“The platform will use a multi-layer intelligence approach, where individual AI capabilities can be synchronized to create an advanced level of intelligence for our business,” said Deep Srivastav, head of AI for Franklin Templeton, in a prepared statement.
In May 2022, Franklin Templeton participated in the Series D round of fintech developer TIFIN, which itself launched a specialized artificial intelligence development unit called TIFIN.AI in July 2023.
Many advisors are familiar with the all-in-one financial advisory technology platform AdvisorEngine, which Franklin Templeton acquired in 2020, but a company spokesperson said the AI platform was being built separately from that business.
Technology collaboration is nothing new for the $1.6 trillion asset manager; in 2020 Franklin Templeton partnered with Apex Clearing to build a white-label robo advisor called Tango, and more recently in 2021, worked with Vestwell 401(k) technology and acquired O'Shaughnessy Asset Management and its custom indexing platform, Canvas.