#599
Game of Codes: AI Agents Are Coming for Finance's Throne
Published:
Jul 12, 2025
Author:
Sarah Parsons Wolter
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From quant shops to Excel modeling farms, this week's news confirms AI finance agents are no longer coming: they're here. From Man Group's production-ready quant research system to Shortcut's Excel automation platform, intelligent systems are now autonomously generating, coding, and executing complex financial strategies at machine speed and scale.
Man Group's pioneering AlphaGPT system exemplifies this evolution. The world's largest listed hedge fund has deployed an AI agent that mimics how quant researchers develop investment signals: it digs into data for ideas, writes code for potential strategies, and backtests them on historical data. Several dozen AI-generated signals have passed Man Group's investment committee and are slated for live trading. The system can "spit out ideas like every two, three seconds without stopping, which is just impossible for humans to do" while leveraging knowledge from large language models to generate strategies human researchers might never consider.
On the analysis side, tools like Shortcut by Fundamental are automating the Excel-heavy work that has dominated finance for decades. This AI Excel agent can complete equity research models, LBO analyses, and scenario planning in minutes rather than hours. The system is already scoring over 80% on real-world Excel Championship problems in around ten minutes—problems that usually take experts an hour or more. Instead of analysts spending days building models cell by cell, they can now upload files, ask questions, and receive fully built financial models in minutes.
As AI agents become more powerful, it’s still unclear how they’ll spread across the finance world. Will traditional firms slowly adopt them alongside human professionals, like Man Group is doing? Or will new firms be built entirely around AI, running faster and cheaper with little human input? A lot depends on regulation - will rules change to allow AI to make decisions on its own, or will human oversight stay required? However this ends, one thing’s clear: GenAI ain’t coming back next summer to be your intern.
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Game of Codes: AI Agents Are Coming for Finance
Man Group says agentic AI is now devising quant trading signals - Man Group’s quant equity unit says it has begun using a new artificial-intelligence system that can generate, code and backtest trading ideas, marking the arrival of agentic AI at the world’s largest listed hedge fund. Read more
Industry News
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Revolut in talks to raise new funding at $65b valuation - The UK-based financial technology group is in discussions to raise about $1b of funding via newly issued shares and the sale of some existing stock, in a transaction that would fuel global expansion for Europe's most valuable start-up. The US investment firm Greenoaks is in talks to lead the private funding round, one person said. Read more
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