Mumbai, September  2024.

Star Union Dai-ichi Life Insurance Co. Ltd. (SUD Life), a leading life insurance company in India, and QuantumStreet AI, a global leader in the field of AI-powered investment solutions, today announced their plans to collaborate to incorporate cutting edge generative AI powered by IBM watsonx into the investment offerings of SUD Life. The announcement was made at IBM Think Mumbai 2024, where QuantumStreet AI also formally launched their India service offerings.

As part of the collaboration, SUD Life and QuantumStreet AI will design an investment product aimed at providing superior performance in the large market capitalization (large cap) space. Similar to the trend seen in western capital markets, it is becoming increasingly harder to generate outperformance in Indian large cap portfolios, as well. To address this scenario, the two firms plan to leverage the advanced capabilities of the IBM watsonx platform for generating insights that will form the core of the investment product and differentiate the offering. Ultimately, the investment solution is projected to benefit retail clients by taking advantage of AI in a trustworthy and responsible manner.

Commenting on the partnership, Arindam Ghosh, Chief Technology Officer and Prashant Sharma, Chief Investment Officer of Star Union Dai-ichi Life Insurance, said, "We are excited to partner with a world leading fintech to bring innovative products to our clients. In today's data-driven world, it is nearly impossible for individuals to process the vast amounts of information available, and AI has become an indispensable tool for fund managers, helping derive meaningful insights from growing data volumes. It is no longer a ‘nice-to-have’ but a ‘must-have.’"  

Subhra Tripathy and Chris Natividad, Principals at QuantumStreet AI, stated, "This partnership is a reflection of SUD Life's innovative culture. We would look to deliver our capabilities to them as we have done for leading banks, wealth managers and pension funds around the world.”

Sandip Patel, Managing Director, IBM India & South Asia said, “As India’s capital markets undergo a pivotal transformation, the role of AI in enhancing investment solutions has never been more important. The collaboration between IBM and QuantumStreet AI sets a new standard for the Indian insurance industry with IBM watsonx at its core. With powerful AI-driven insights that are governed with the highest levels of trust and transparency, this will usher in a new era of responsible investment practices."

As part of the future plans of the collaboration, QuantumStreetAI and Dai-ichi Life will also explore joint product development in Japan. In addition to India’s life insurance industry, QuantumStreetAI will offer its services to the asset management and wealth management sectors where generative AI can be leveraged for research, as alpha generation platform, and risk management.

With QuantumStreet AI utilizing IBM watsonx as the foundation for thesolution, institutional investors will get an opportunity to benefit from its generative AI-powered data insights.watsonx is IBM’s next-generation AI and data platform, which enables businesses to build and refine both new, generative AI foundation models as well as traditional machine learning systems. IBM watsonx makes effective adoption of responsible AI possible by training, validating, tuning and deploying AI systems across the business with speed, trusted data and governance.