Published by Global Banking and Finance Review
Posted on February 18, 2025
By Samuel Shen and Tom Westbrook
SHANGHAI/SINGAPORE (Reuters) - Tiger Brokers said on Tuesday it embedded DeepSeek's model into its AI-powered chatbot, as brokerages and money managers race to capitalise on the Chinese start-up's artificial intelligence breakthrough, and develop use cases for the financial industry.
The integration of the DeepSeek-R1 model into TigerGPT follows DeepSeek's meteoric rise which stunned Silicon Valley and triggered a rally in Chinese tech shares on bets of an AI revolution sweeping across sectors from education to finance.
Tiger Brokers, an online broker backed by shareholders including Chinese electronics maker Xiaomi and renowned U.S. investor Jim Rogers, is the latest to embrace DeepSeek.
At least 20 Chinese brokers and fund managers, including Sinolink Securities, CICC Wealth Management and China Universal Asset Management, have already started to integrate DeepSeek models into their businesses, potentially changing the way they conduct research, manage risks, make investment decisions and interact with clients.
DeepSeek will be able to tap Tiger Brokers' financial data and help customers analyse valuations, make trading decisions and "feel the beauty of investment," said Wu Tianhua, Tiger Brokers' founder and CEO.
"Its impact is real. It's no longer a concept, or a marketing trick," he told Reuters in an interview.
UBS expects rapid AI adoption will boost financial IT spending by 24%, or 69 billion yuan ($9.49 billion), in five years, benefiting vendors including Hundsun Technologies Inc, Northking Information Technology Co and iSoftStone Information Technology (Group) Co.
"We expect the launch of DeepSeek R1 to drive faster GenAI adoption in the financial industry in 2025," UBS analyst Haifeng Cao said, referring to DeepSeek's recently released model that was developed at a fraction of the cost of Western rivals.
"We think the industry is likely to be more profoundly reshaped by GenAI than others, given its data-heavy and high labour intensive characteristics, and high mix of language-related tasks."
An index tracking China's Fintech companies has jumped 17% this month, flirting with record highs.
INSPIRING
Tiger Brokers said the upgraded version of its investment assistant TigerGPT will initially be available for free to users in mainland China and Singapore.
"The integration of DeepSeek has enhanced TigerGPT's logical reasoning abilities, enabling it to analyse market shifts more clearly and interpret investment opportunities more effectively," CEO Wu said.
The chain of thoughts generated by the DeepSeek model "is often inspiring to even most seasoned traders."
Sinolink Securities, which sees AI as a key engine of growth, said early this month it would use the DeepSeek model in a range of scenarios including information search, market analysis and industry research. In the future, the application will be expanded to core business areas such as risks management and investing.
CICC Wealth Management said its has integrated DeepSeek's R1 model into its investment advisory services, potentially boosting information processing efficiency by 90%.
Zhongou Fund Management said the immediate challenge for the financial industry is to standardize internal database to feed AI models.
"AI has given financial companies a tool to make better use of troves of data" which was previously sitting idle, said Zhongou's head of tech research Du Houliang.
"Now, many financial institutions, including us, are hurrying into meetings" to discuss how local adoption of DeepSeek's models can empower internal management, marketing, and investing.
($1 = 7.2730 Chinese yuan renminbi)
(Reporting by Samuel Shen in Shanghai and Tom Westbrook in Singapore; Editing by Shri Navaratnam)
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