Frédéric Genta, Head of Europe at Azura Partners and Professor at ESCP, shares his vision of finance undergoing a complete overhaul under the influence of artificial intelligence, with Monaco as a laboratory for innovation.
AI is transforming finance at an unprecedented speed. Until now, technology has mainly been used to automate repetitive tasks – KYC, reporting, compliance. Tomorrow, it will be the very foundation of value creation.
It automates yesterday: no analyst should have to spend hours checking the compliance of a portfolio. But above all, it invents tomorrow: thanks to AI, we have access to weak signals that are impossible for a human alone to process. It allows us to sense market momentum before others do, to anticipate fundraising because teams are on the move, or to read an emerging trend in the media noise.
We are entering the era of augmented economic intelligence.
No, it will reposition them. Employees are no longer executors, but strategists. They steer, supervise and embody customer relations. AI takes care of the mechanical tasks; humans focus on judgement, ethics and trust.
It is an unprecedented partnership: humans augmented by machines. This requires us to review our training programmes, our organisational charts, and even our very conception of what a modern finance team is.
Banks and management companies must accept one truth: they are no longer just financial institutions, they must become technology companies.
We would no longer build a bank or asset management company today as we did 20 or 30 years ago: the architecture must be cloud-native, modular and digital from end to end. Processes must be fluid, fast, secure and, above all, capable of integrating AI at every stage.
The second area of focus is partnerships. The institutions that will succeed are those that know how to ally themselves with Big Tech, but also with specialised start-ups, in order to achieve agility and innovation. Large groups suffer from their technical legacy, but more agile structures – independent management companies, family-owned private banks – have a card to play: decide quickly, invest intelligently and transform themselves profoundly.
Monaco has always been a territory of innovation, at the crossroads of finance and technology. With its human scale, its capacity for rapid decision-making and its concentration of international investors, the Principality can become a unique testing ground.
But beyond its agile governance, Monaco has cutting-edge technological infrastructure: a Sovereign Cloud guaranteeing data control and security, full 5G coverage enabling the deployment of next-generation digital services, and a dynamic ecosystem of digital services companies capable of supporting banks, management companies and clients in this transformation.
It is this combination – international finance, sovereign technological infrastructure and institutional agility – that makes Monaco a strategic player in the AI revolution applied to finance.
On the contrary. AI can become compliance’s best ally. Aggregating thousands of sources, cross-checking in real time, alerting in seconds: no human alone has this capacity.
AI is not a risk to regulation, it is an opportunity to strengthen the robustness of the financial system.
It is a Copernican revolution. Finance, like e-commerce, will never be the same again. Those who adapt will become the leaders of tomorrow; those who hesitate will be left behind.
We are not talking about incremental improvement. We are talking about a complete overhaul. Finance is entering a new era: one of augmented humans, agile institutions, and value creation driven by artificial intelligence.
The time for caution is over. It is now time for strategic boldness.
