Personalized Finance Advisory through Case-based Recommender Systems and Diversification Strategies

Recommendation of financial investment strategies is a complex and knowledge-intensive task. Typically, financial advisors have to discuss at length with their wealthy clients and have to sift through several investment proposals before finding one able to completely meet investors' needs and constraints. As a consequence, a recent trend in wealth management is to improve the advisory process by exploiting recommendation technologies. This paper proposes a framework for recommendation of asset allocation strategies which combines case-based reasoning with a novel diversification strategy to support financial advisors in the task of proposing diverse and personalized investment portfolios. The performance of the framework has been evaluated by means of an experimental session conducted against 1172 real users, and results show that the yield obtained by recommended portfolios overcomes that of portfolios proposed by human advisors in most experimental settings while meeting the preferred risk profile. Furthermore, our diversification strategy shows promising results in terms of both diversity and average yield

Case-based recommender systems for personalized finance advisory

Wealth Management is a business model operated by banks and brokers, that offers a broad range of investment services to individual clients to help them reach their investment objectives. Wealth management services include investment advisory, subscription of mandates, sales of financial products, collection of investment orders by clients. Due to the complexity of the tasks, which largely require a deep knowledge of the financial domain, a trend in the area is the exploitation of recommendation technologies to support financial advisors and to improve the effectiveness of the process. The talk presents a framework to support financial advisors in the task of providing clients with personalized investment strategies. The methodology is based on the exploitation of case-based reasoning and the introduction of a diversification technique. A prototype of the framework has been used to generate personalized portfolios, and its performance, evaluated against 1,172 real users, shows that the yield obtained by recommended portfolios overcomes that of portfolios proposed by human advisors in most experimental settings

A smart financial advisory system exploiting Case-Based Reasoning

In the financial advisory context, knowledge-based recommendations based on Case-Based Reasoning are an emerging trend. They usually exploit knowledge about past experiences and about the characterization of both customers and financial products. In the present paper, we report the experience related to the development of a case-based recommendation module in a project called SmartFasi. We present a solution aimed at personalizing the asset picking phase, by taking into consideration choices made by customers who have a financial and personal data profile "similar" to the current one. We discuss the notion of distance-based similarity adopted in our system and how to actually implement an asset recommendation strategy integrated with the other software modules of SmartFasi. We finally discuss the impact such a strategy may have both from the point of view of private investors and professional users

Новая взвешенная гибридная система рекомендаций с использованием коэффициента Шарпа для прибыльного диверсифицированного инвестиционного портфеля

Identifying where to invest and how much to invest can be very challenging for common people who have limited knowledge in the domain. Portfolio managers are financial professionals who spend a lot of time and effort to help investors in investing funds and implementing investment strategies, but not all can afford to consult them. The study aims to develop a weighted hybrid recommendation system that recommends an optimized investment portfolio based on the investor’s preferences regarding risk and return. Generally, investors usually ask investment for advice from friends or relatives with similar risk preferences or if they are interested in a particular item, the investors ask for the experience of someone who already has invested in the same item. Therefore, the methodology considers the investor’s past behavior and the past behavior of the nearest neighbor investors with similar risk preferences. Using user-based collaborative filtering the number of stocks is recommended using Pearson correlation based on the investor’s income, then using another user-based collaborative filtering the number of stocks is recommended based on the investor’s age. Weights are assigned to the recommended number of stocks generated based on income and age and their weighted average is finally considered. Finally, the feasibility of the proposed system was assessed through various experiments. Based on the received results, the authors conclude that the proposed weighted hybrid approach is robust enough for implementation in the real world. The novelty of the paper lies in the fact that none of the existing approaches make use of more than one type of weighted recommendation algorithm. Additionally, the final results obtained this way have been never further fortified with the highest Sharpe ratio and minimum risk for the investor. This combination of hybrid and Sharpe ratios has never been explored before.Выбор того, куда и сколько инвестировать, может быть очень сложной задачей для обычных людей, которые имеют ограниченные знания в этой области. Портфолио-менеджеры — это финансовые профессионалы, которые тратят много времени и усилий, чтобы помочь инвесторам в размещении средств и реализации финансовых стратегий, но не все могут позволить себе обратиться к ним за консультацией. Цель исследования — разработать взвешенную систему гибридных рекомендаций оптимизированного инвестиционного портфеля на основе предпочтений инвестора относительно риска и доходности. Как правило, инвесторы спрашивают совета по инвестициям у друзей или родственников со схожими предпочтениями в отношении риска, или, если их интересует конкретный товар, у того, кто уже инвестировал в тот же товар. Поэтому методология учитывает прошлое поведение инвестора и его ближайших соседей-инвесторов со схожими предпочтениями риска. С помощью коллаборативной фильтрации на основе интересов пользователя авторы рекомендуют выбрать определенное количество акций, используя метод корреляции Пирсона на основе дохода инвестора. Затем с помощью другой коллаборативной фильтрации на основе интересов пользователя рекомендуется определенное количество акций на основе возраста инвестора. Рекомендованному количеству акций, сгенерированному на основе дохода и возраста инвестора, присваиваются веса, и в итоге считается их средневзвешенное значение. В заключение проведена оценка реализуемости предложенной системы с помощью различных экспериментов. На основании полученных результатов авторы делают вывод, что предложенный взвешенный гибридный подход достаточно надежен для реализации в реальных условиях. Новизна работы заключается в том, что ни один из существующих подходов не использует более одного типа алгоритма взвешенных рекомендаций. Кроме того, конечные результаты, полученные таким образом, также никогда не отличались максимальным коэффициентом Шарпа и минимальным риском для инвестора. Такая комбинация гибридной фильтрации и коэффициента Шарпа никогда ранее не исследовалась

Collaborative-demographic hybrid for financial: product recommendation

Internship Report presented as the partial requirement for obtaining a Master's degree in Data Science and Advanced AnalyticsDue to the increased availability of mature data mining and analysis technologies supporting CRM processes, several financial institutions are striving to leverage customer data and integrate insights regarding customer behaviour, needs, and preferences into their marketing approach. As decision support systems assisting marketing and commercial efforts, Recommender Systems applied to the financial domain have been gaining increased attention. This thesis studies a Collaborative- Demographic Hybrid Recommendation System, applied to the financial services sector, based on real data provided by a Portuguese private commercial bank. This work establishes a framework to support account managers’ advice on which financial product is most suitable for each of the bank’s corporate clients. The recommendation problem is further developed by conducting a performance comparison for both multi-output regression and multiclass classification prediction approaches. Experimental results indicate that multiclass architectures are better suited for the prediction task, outperforming alternative multi-output regression models on the evaluation metrics considered. Withal, multiclass Feed-Forward Neural Networks, combined with Recursive Feature Elimination, is identified as the topperforming algorithm, yielding a 10-fold cross-validated F1 Measure of 83.16%, and achieving corresponding values of Precision and Recall of 84.34%, and 85.29%, respectively. Overall, this study provides important contributions for positioning the bank’s commercial efforts around customers’ future requirements. By allowing for a better understanding of customers’ needs and preferences, the proposed Recommender allows for more personalized and targeted marketing contacts, leading to higher conversion rates, corporate profitability, and customer satisfaction and loyalty

Nudged to Win: Designing Robo-Advisory to Overcome Decision Inertia

Decision inertia is a serious problem in financial decision-making and thus a challenge for decision support systems. We discuss recent findings and review antecedents and consequences of decision inertia from a psychological perspective. We use these insights to develop IT-based methods designed to overcome decision inertia using psychologically optimized financial decision support systems. Furthermore, we propose an experimental study to evaluate the design features of such a system. Our work is a first step in designing adaptive decision support systems that detect situations in which the user is prone to decision inertia and react by adapting interface elements appropriately that might otherwise exacerbate decision inertia – for a specific user in a specific decision situation

Next-Generation Personalized Investment Recommendations

Recent advances in Big Data and Artificial Intelligence have created new opportunities for AI-based agents, referred to as Robo-Advisors, to provide financial advice and recommendations to investors. In this chapter, we will introduce the concept of investment recommendation and describe how automated services for this task can be developed and tested. In particular, this chapter covers the following core topics: (1) the legal landscape for investment recommendation systems, (2) what financial asset recommendation is and what data it needs to function, (3) how to clean and curate that data, (4) approaches to build/train asset recommendation models and (5) how to evaluate such systems prior to putting them into production

Big Data and Artificial Intelligence in Digital Finance

This open access book presents how cutting-edge digital technologies like Big Data, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Blockchain are set to disrupt the financial sector. The book illustrates how recent advances in these technologies facilitate banks, FinTech, and financial institutions to collect, process, analyze, and fully leverage the very large amounts of data that are nowadays produced and exchanged in the sector. To this end, the book also describes some more the most popular Big Data, AI and Blockchain applications in the sector, including novel applications in the areas of Know Your Customer (KYC), Personalized Wealth Management and Asset Management, Portfolio Risk Assessment, as well as variety of novel Usage-based Insurance applications based on Internet-of-Things data. Most of the presented applications have been developed, deployed and validated in real-life digital finance settings in the context of the European Commission funded INFINITECH project, which is a flagship innovation initiative for Big Data and AI in digital finance. This book is ideal for researchers and practitioners in Big Data, AI, banking and digital finance

Big Data and Artificial Intelligence in Digital Finance

This open access book presents how cutting-edge digital technologies like Big Data, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Blockchain are set to disrupt the financial sector. The book illustrates how recent advances in these technologies facilitate banks, FinTech, and financial institutions to collect, process, analyze, and fully leverage the very large amounts of data that are nowadays produced and exchanged in the sector. To this end, the book also describes some more the most popular Big Data, AI and Blockchain applications in the sector, including novel applications in the areas of Know Your Customer (KYC), Personalized Wealth Management and Asset Management, Portfolio Risk Assessment, as well as variety of novel Usage-based Insurance applications based on Internet-of-Things data. Most of the presented applications have been developed, deployed and validated in real-life digital finance settings in the context of the European Commission funded INFINITECH project, which is a flagship innovation initiative for Big Data and AI in digital finance. This book is ideal for researchers and practitioners in Big Data, AI, banking and digital finance