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ZDNET’s key takeaways
- Anthropic’s Claude chatbot just got a suite of finance updates.
- Claude can draft financial reports, access new data, and more.
- AI is playing an increasingly central role in the financial sector.
Anthropic is ramping up its efforts to court new customers in the finance sector with a suite of upgrades for Claude, including an integration with Microsoft Excel, seven new market data connectors, and six new Agent Skills.
The upgrades arrive at a time when Anthropic is leaning more heavily into its partnership with Microsoft, and when the finance sector is being reshaped by the ongoing rise of generative AI tools. Here’s what’s new, and what each upgrade can do.
Excel integration
Anthropic announced Monday that Claude can now be integrated directly with Microsoft Excel, allowing users to interact with it via a sidebar that appears on an open spreadsheet (like Clippy — RIP — just a little smarter). For example, users can prompt the chatbot to answer questions about spreadsheet data, modify them while preserving the overall structure, or create entirely new spreadsheets.
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The Excel integration builds on a partnership between Anthropic and Microsoft that was first reported last month. Microsoft has since embedded Anthropic’s AI models across its Microsoft 365 suite and into its Copilot AI assistant.
Claude for Excel is available now as a preview to paid users of Anthropic’s Max, Enterprise, and Teams subscription tiers.
Connecting to global market info
Each of Claude’s seven new connectors directly links the chatbot with a financial services platform, allowing the chatbot to pull data from them in real time.
Also: AI just passed a brutal finance exam most humans fail – should analysts be worried?
A new connector with the financial research platform Aiera, for example, gives Claude access to transcripts of company earnings calls, summaries of investor meetings, and other breaking financial documents. Another one with financial news website MT Newswires keeps the chatbot up to date on the latest market news. Google announced a similar update in August, fusing a chatbot and live market updates into its Finance platform.
The other connectors link to credit reporting agency Moody’s, the London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG), cloud security platform Egnyte, portfolio monitoring software company Chronograph, and global investment research firm Third Bridge (via the Aiera connector).
New finance-forward Skills
In addition to being able to pull real-time data via the seven new connectors, Claude also now has six new finance Skills. The company debuted Agent Skills for Claude — or simply “Skills” — earlier this month. These are customizable folders of preset instructions that shape Claude’s performance on a given task, such as drafting a document that aligns with a company’s brand voice. They’re designed to make the chatbot more personalizable and useful: less of a general assistant, more of a digital employee that understands a particular business’s policies and procedures.
Also: How AI can help you manage your finances (and what to watch out for)
The six new Skills share that goal, with a focus on financial research. The new earnings analysis Skill, for example, takes a company’s quarterly transcripts and financial data and turns them into digestible reports, including statements from executives and strategic recommendations. The other Skills include analyzing comparable companies, modeling discounted cash flow, processing data room documents, generating company profiles for pitchbooks and buyer lists, and initiating reports covering companies’ financial performance.
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Like the Excel integration, Skills are available now as a research preview to paid users of Anthropic’s Max, Enterprise, and Teams subscription tiers.
AI and finance
Algorithms have long been used on Wall Street and throughout the financial sector to analyze and predict convoluted market trends. But the use of AI has been growing over recent years with the rise of chatbots like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude, which are trained to detect subtle mathematical patterns across enormous troves of data.
A study published last month found that some industry-leading AI models were able to pass the Chartered Financial Analyst Level III exam, widely viewed as the finance sector’s most difficult aptitude test, suggesting that such tools could soon take over some of the more routine aspects of roles like financial planning and portfolio management.
Also: Fighting AI with AI, finance firms prevented $5 million in fraud – but at what cost?
Meanwhile, generative AI deepfakes and other forms of scamartistry have led to new opportunities for financial fraudsters — along with new possibilities for financial firms to protect themselves from such attacks.