Lab of Forward Thinking (LOFT) is teaming up with indico data solutions, a Boston-based company that specializes in Deep Learning, as part of a strategic effort to leverage best-in-class products and accelerate business adoption of innovative technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), blockchain and virtual reality.

John Hancock launched the LOFT last year, which aims to promote a high impact environment and provide a centralized resource for employees across John Hancock and parent company Manulife to collaborate and devise new forward-thinking technology solutions for the companies’ various wealth and asset management and insurance business lines.

Using indico's platform, LOFT will develop an AI and Deep Learning tool to analyze unstructured financial data. Using Deep Learning, Manulife will be able to analyze data from news articles, analyst reports and other similar sources and present recommendations that could help investment researchers and portfolio managers make more informed decisions in comparatively less time. 

"indico will help us accelerate our use of Deep Learning to improve the decision-making capabilities of our analysts, portfolio managers and researchers," said Greg Framke, Executive Vice President and Chief Information Officer, Manulife. "By introducing new capabilities that we know will add to our user experience and overall impact we will improve the customer experience."

indico provides a machine learning platform for text and image analysis that can be deployed in the cloud or on premise and utilized via a simple to use web service. This enables companies to automatically extract meaningful insight from unstructured data at scale regardless of their size or capability.

"We have spent the past few years building a platform that significantly lowers the barriers of use around Deep Learning and this opens up tremendous potential around unstructured data analytics”, said Slater Victoroff, indico CEO and co-founder. “John Hancock and Manulife are on the leading edge looking to more fully utilize their unstructured data assets to better serve their various constituents”.

Manulife's LOFT is using indico's Deep Learning platform to decipher natural language and more efficiently train the computer to extract insights that can be tailored to each analyst's individual requirements.  

"We are continuing to invest in our product capabilities to make it easier for our customers to deploy our product in this vein especially in the context of the financial services industry.  We are thrilled about the innovative work that the Manulife team has been doing and look forward to continuing our partnership with them”, said Vishal Daga, Chief Customer Officer, indico.

The announcement follows on Manulife LOFT's recent collaboration with Nervana Systems to build the next generation of intelligent applications.