Reimagining the Future of Finance: Key Insights from the AWS, Alkymi and Farther Event

At the recent Reimagining the Future of Finance event, leaders from Alkymi, AWS and Farther explored how AI is reshaping financial services and what it will take to implement these technologies responsibly. The discussion centered on how AI is transforming private markets, wealth management and the broader financial ecosystem. The discussion focused on real-world impact, essential security measures and the practical considerations firms must address as they adopt these tools at scale.

Alkymi - Harald Collet, CEO and Co-founder

Alkymi builds AI-powered data workflow automation for private markets and institutional investors. Alkymi partners with some of the world’s largest asset owners and asset managers to convert unstructured, document-heavy workflows into structured, accurate, real-time data that can drive investment decisions, operations and reporting. Harald brings decades of experience from Oracle, Autonomy and Bloomberg, where he led governance and compliance, giving him deep insight into the intersection of regulation, data and enterprise technology.

Farther - Brad Genser, CTO and Co-founder

Farther is a next-generation wealth management platform that modernizes how advisors serve their clients. The platform uses AI to analyze portfolios, extract insights from statements, power natural language interactions and automate quantitative rebalancing. Brad is a U.S. Army veteran and former Goldman Sachs VP whose work centers on building technology that amplifies advisor capabilities.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) - Tyler Marthaler, Principal Financial Services Specialist

Tyler advises leading financial institutions on secure cloud adoption, AI strategy and the application of large-scale models in regulated environments. His work centers on AWS Bedrock, a fully managed service that enables organizations to run large language models in environments where strict data privacy, residency and security controls are required. Bedrock allows clients to use LLMs while ensuring that model parameters, customer data and fine-tuned weights remain encrypted and isolated within their virtual private cloud.

AI in Action: Transforming Private Markets and Wealth Management

Alkymi highlighted how its AI-powered platform is helping the world’s leading asset managers transform dense, unstructured private markets data into structured, actionable information. Workflows that once took days now take minutes, enabling teams to scale operations, improve decision quality, and feed downstream systems in real time.

Harald Collet, CEO, Alkymi explained that AI does more than increase efficiency. It unlocks the potential for better capital allocation across the entire private markets ecosystem.

Private markets data is incredibly dense and complex. It is an asset class that is growing fast, and regulatory changes are pushing it into real-time reporting. That creates a lot of headaches, and we love taking those on and solving them for our clients.

- Harald Collet, CEO, Alkymi

Farther demonstrated how its wealth management platform uses AI to analyze portfolios, extract insights from statements, and power natural language conversations that connect directly with quantitative rebalancing functions. Their approach centers on amplifying advisor capabilities rather than replacing them.

When you come with an application that's amplifying people, people are all in. When you come with a solution that's going to replace them, they're not all in.

- Brad Genser, CTO, Farther

Across both use cases, AI is already elevating financial professionals to focus on judgment, relationship building, and strategic work rather than data extraction and mechanical tasks.

Data Privacy, Residency, and the Rise of Bedrock

One of the most important and engaging topics covered was data privacy and residency.

Financial institutions operate under strict regulatory and geographic constraints. Data must stay within defined jurisdictions and meet requirements for privacy, encryption, auditability, model isolation and controlled access. It must also comply with internal governance policies, industry standards and regulator-mandated frameworks for retention, residency and third-party oversight. This is where AWS Bedrock has become a game-changing solution.

As AWS Principal Financial Services Specialist Tyler Marthaler explained, secure AI deployment is not new territory for AWS.

Data residency and GDPR compliance isn't an AI problem. It's a challenge AWS has been handling for 15 years. Whether it's portfolio data in a table or AI model parameters, if it needs to reside in Germany, it has to reside in Germany.

When you're working with a model inside the context of Bedrock, you get a copy of the base model trained on your data. All of those changed parameters, biases, and weights sit encrypted in your VPC. The key thing to understand is that it never goes upstream. Your data stays isolated and secure within your environment.

- Tyler Marthaler, Principal Financial Services Specialist

For global financial institutions, this unlocks new possibilities. They can finally apply LLMs to sensitive workflows without compromising privacy, regulatory constraints, or data governance frameworks.

Building AI with Privacy and Security

A recurring theme was the importance of trust in AI systems, especially in high-stakes environments like the financial industry where outputs must be correct 100% of the time.

Speakers emphasized that human-in-the-loop validation is not going away. It is a critical component for building confidence, maintaining accuracy, and meeting regulatory expectations. As firms adopt more automation, people want transparency and control over how data moves through AI systems.

As routine workloads become automated, individuals want to understand their role in the new workflow. They want work that connects to purpose and contributes meaningfully to clients and organizations.

The Human Side of AI

Beyond technical and security discussion, the panel addressed the human impact of AI. Work has always been a cornerstone of identity and community. As automation reshapes tasks, firms need to be intentional about elevating professionals. AI should free teams from repetitive tasks so they can focus on decision-making, client relationships, and creative problem solving. This is not only a productivity opportunity but a cultural one.

Cautious Optimism and a Clear Path Ahead

The sentiment was cautiously optimistic about AI. AI is not only transforming workflows, it is opening the door to better decisions, more transparent markets, stronger advisor-client relationships, and greater societal wealth.

But success requires more than models and automation: