The platform will use composable business applications to help Franklin Templeton rapidly embed AI in its processes and enable digital transformation at scale. The two firms - leaders in their respective industries - are aligning capabilities to facilitate continuous innovation within financial services.

This new financial AI platform will be built using Microsoft Azure AI services including Azure OpenAI Service (GPT-4 model), Azure AI Search, and Azure AI Document Intelligence. A first potential benefit will be to improve the productivity of sales and marketing teams and to create more personalized support for their clients.

“The platform will use a multi-layer intelligence approach, where individual AI capabilities can be synchronized to create an advanced level of intelligence for our business,” said Deep Srivastav, Head of AI for Franklin Templeton. “As we went through our early work on this, we realized how cutting edge this can be and decided to build this together.”

Personalized experiences are key to delivering differentiated value to financial services clients. It is, however, challenging to merge structured data with contextual financial information, which means they are usually kept separate, with many AI initiatives thus focusing on limited capabilities such as summarization and basic conversations. Combining the two in a single, powerful capability is exactly what this collaboration aims to achieve.

“The future of how we work with clients to best meet their desired investment outcomes will require strong technological resources,” said Jenny Johnson, President and CEO of Franklin Templeton. “The newly introduced platform we are building with Microsoft marks a pivotal moment in Franklin Templeton’s journey, empowering sales and marketing teams to deliver unparalleled service while simplifying information consumption for clients. We are excited to collaborate with Microsoft to bring this innovative solution to the marketplace.”

“We’re pleased to see the successful co-innovation between Franklin Templeton and Microsoft come to life,” said Bill Borden, Corporate Vice President, Worldwide Financial Services for Microsoft. “Bringing together the financial services and technology expertise and shared vision of our teams, Franklin Templeton’s financial AI platform ushers in a new realm of capabilities for the industry, helping drive the personalization that today’s clients expect.”

Franklin Templeton has been on the leading edge of innovation across multiple areas ranging from digital assets and digital wealth to the firm’s proprietary Goals Optimization Engine (GOE) and Custom Indexing capability offered through Canvas.