Luma Insights:

Q&A with Luma’s Chief Technology Officer, Arun Kumar

As Luma’s Chief Technology Officer, you lead the development and engineering of a global platform that simplifies alternative investments for financial professionals. What do you love most about what you do?  

Luma as an organization possesses the capability to move faster and further than some of the largest firms within our industry. It brings me great satisfaction to uphold our company’s motto of “speed matters,” as it holds significant value in our operations. The truth is swift execution truly makes a difference in our success. 

In addition to speed, being agile and nimble to bring a very meaningful change to people’s lives so quickly is just incredible. It’s super exciting for me to see big gains for our users that we can provide within a matter of days or even sometimes hours, versus having to wait weeks and months.  

What opportunities do you see financial advisors missing out on because they aren’t fully leveraging the possibilities that FinTech can offer to their business?  

I think the biggest opportunities are around analytics, insights, and automation. In terms of how financial advisors do business, I see a massive gap in the technology and tool sets that they have available to be able to make the most informed decisions.  A little known fact is that financial advisors still rely heavily on Excel. And it might be shocking for you to hear this, but Excel came to the market in 1985.  

When you take a moment to consider the range of tools that financial advisors have at their disposal, it’s remarkable to note that Excel still holds a prominent position despite being around for over 30 years, and it’s clear that users can be leveraging the latest advancements in machine learning, AI, and big data analytics. Despite the huge strides made in these areas, only a small fraction of these tools are currently being utilized by financial advisors. At the end of the day, there’s an enormous opportunity for financial advisors to leverage the technological advancements made over the last few decades to make insightful decisions and optimize their workflows. By doing so, they can achieve more while investing far less time than they currently do in many of their tasks. 

The conversations around ChatGPT are exploding right now. What are your thoughts on this AI technology and how do you see it potentially impacting our industry?  

ChatGPT is one of these tools that is truly going to transform many different aspects of our industry and the way in which companies operate. At a high level, it increases efficiency. Let me explain a few examples where ChatGPT can make an immediate impact: 

From an engineering perspective, ChatGPT can be used for a variety of tasks such as translating code written in one language to another or upgrading the code base to a different language. Additionally, ChatGPT can assist with writing boilerplate code, allowing engineers to focus on more complex tasks. 

Another way in which ChatGPT can be tremendously helpful at an organizational level is with generating documents. This can apply to the broader industry level as well. Instead of relying on manual processes, standardized documents such as term sheets and fact sheets can be easily generated using ChatGPT. ChatGPT can also be integrated into conversational AI, facilitating content generation through back-and-forth conversations. 

From generating content and generating trade ideas to price discovery, ChatGPT has limitless possibilities and has the potential to transform the industry in terms of content and idea generation. The key is to apply it in various angles and places where we can utilize ChatGPT to generate efficiencies, because again, speed matters.  

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