Ex-Goldman Sachs banker that worked on thousands of financial models wants AI to build it for you
According to Anthropic, financial services is very exposed to AI in theory, but hardly affected in practice. An ex-Goldman Sachs executive director is looking to change that.
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Mo Achour spent eight years working in M&A at Goldman Sachs in London. He left last year to found Axe AI, which 'builds institutional-grade financial models in minutes, not weeks'. While AI has been effective for word-based tasks, Achour said "Excel is a different beast; it’s cells communicating with each other and formulas inside those cells."
Financial services professionals today don't seem to be impressed with the offerings from established AI labs like Anthropic and OpenAI. When Claude for Excel released, hedge fund employees said it was "far from ready for institutional use cases" at best and "a complete and utter mess" at worst, thanks to its propensity for hallucinations.
In banking, Achour said "there’s no such thing as good enough. It has to be perfect."
Building an AI startup is a risky endeavour. An MIT report last year found that 95% of GenAI projects fail, and basic functionality from the major bots has only gotten better since then. Indeed, OpenAI is encroaching on Achour's turf with 'Project Mercury,' where junior bankers are paid $150 per hour to train OpenAI's LLMs on financial modelling. Achour said his edge is that Axe gets "to skip that entire learning phase," since he "built and reviewed thousands of models" while at Goldman. He said it's not just about knowing what makes a model robust, but also about "what makes it flexible when an MD changes the brief at midnight."
Unlike most investment bankers building startups, Achour has an engineering background via the French Grandes Ecoles, which has allowed him to "see problems and solutions in a different manner." He said being "bilingual" is a rare trait today; "there's not a lot of people that understand tech and finance." That may change if the likes of Project Mercury continue.
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