The financial industry is undergoing a significant transformation. The explosive potential of AI is dismantling long-standing barriers to entry, such as hefty costs, extensive research and development budgets, large IT teams, and protracted development cycles. Now, innovative models are emerging to take their place, and it's crucial to recognise their impact.

In a recent episode of the "Connect With Purpose" podcast, host Augusta spoke with Marco Aboav, CEO of Etna Research, to explore the future of finance. Marco, a veteran who has worked on both the buy and sell sides, is building a firm dedicated to solving one of the industry's most complex challenges: building scalable, high-performance research infrastructure.


Watch/Listen to the podcast and read below for a look at his vision for a more adaptive, human-centric, and automated future for capital markets.

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The New Financial Marathon:

How AI, Adaptability, And Purpose Are Reshaping An Industry

The Core Problem: Tactical Builds vs. Strategic Needs 

For decades, financial firms have faced a familiar, costly problem. Whether a high-performance hedge fund or a wealth manager, building a robust, institutional-grade infrastructure for investment and data science is notoriously difficult.

"Typically in a business environment, you want to get the job done in a certain time window," Marco explains. "But typically it's not designed to be strategic. It tends to be designed to be tactical." 

This tactical approach, which involves building a system for a single specific use case, often leads firms into a costly trap. They spend enormous capital (capex) on a project, only to find that as soon as the market or their needs evolve, they have to start over. Etna Research was founded to solve this by providing a strategic, scalable infrastructure that partners with firms, allowing them to access high-performance capabilities without the internal build-out.

"Frontier AI": The Two-Pronged Revolution

Marco sees "Frontier AI" as a key part of the solution, but he divides its application into two distinct, critical areas:

  1. The Engine Of Adaptability.
  2. The "Human" Interface.

1. The Engine Of Adaptability:

First, AI is the engine for adaptability. With markets changing faster than ever, static investment models are no longer sufficient. The key is to build systems that can handle "adaptivity" using computationally heavy techniques.

However, Marco is quick to draw a line. This is not about using generative AI or LLMs to predict the market. "You will never use, you know, a generative AI model to predict the markets," he states. "It's not designed to handle that kind of use case... It's impossible to use the LLM... to forecast data." 

2. The "Human" Interface:

The second, and perhaps more revolutionary, piece is about human interaction. The financial industry has spent decades algorithmising everything, creating immense complexity. The next step is to make that complexity simple to use.

"We think this evolving into something which is much more human, which means voice, which means text," Marco says. The goal is to make research "human again", bridging the gap between deep quantitative research and the business language that senior leaders use to make decisions.

Agentic AI: A New Front-End For Finance

When asked about "agentic AI," Marco defines it as the ultimate "human touch" or front-end.

He cautions that in high-accuracy businesses like finance, current AI models lack the critical reasoning skills required for deep, high-precision work. Instead, Etna Research uses agentic AI to solve a core business friction: the sales and client interaction cycle.

"The typical use case we see is people... they have an idea A," Marco explains. "And then after two weeks they say, but actually... maybe this is what is important for me, which is B or C." 

In a traditional model, this change in requirements would halt progress. However, by utilising an agentic AI as a "frontman," the system can integrate the client's own "heuristics and experience" with the generative AI, thereby simplifying the friction and enabling rapid, on-the-fly collaboration.

The One-Person, Billion-Dollar Company

This wave of automation, according to Marco, is what makes Sam Altman's concept of a "one-person billion-dollar company" not just possible but likely, with potential originating from the finance sector.

This isn't just about having a good product. It's about automating the two other pillars of a business:

1. Running The Business: 

Activities in HR, accounting, finance, and marketing are now "so many activities that these days can be structured and more automated than just three, four, five years ago." 

1. Distributing The Product:

This is the big one. Generative AI becomes the "distribution advantage."  "You don't need 300 people in New York, London and Tokyo," Marco says. "But you really have something out there that can actually solve the problem of the clients 24/7, always there, always ready to talk." 

Surviving The "Insane Marathon"

Running a firm at the cutting edge of this high-stress industry is, as Marco puts it, "an insane marathon." So how does he manage the pressure?

He credits a mindset shift away from short-term sprints. "You are successful because of the pains, you are not successful because of the wins," he says. "If you don't have pains, you have no wins." This means thinking like an athlete: maintaining mental and physical fitness and, crucially, finding balance. "You cannot play the game of oh, I work 15 hours per day, Saturday included, because it doesn't work." 

Ultimately, he stresses that the battle is internal. "It's never a game of, you know, me against you, but it's really... me against myself," he reflects. "And I always stress this, it's always trying to be better than yourself." 

A Purpose Beyond Profit: Building The Iconic

For Marco, the final piece of the puzzle is purpose. The drive isn't just to be profitable, but to "build something that has a massive global impact" and "be remembered to do something iconic." 

This desire to "give back" has a practical application. Marco is involved with PugliaTech, an association in Southern Italy that helps entrepreneurs build new ventures. It stems from what he calls a "scientists point of view." 

"It's like being a scientist," he concludes. "You want to be remembered for doing something meaningful to society." 

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