Back in late 2022, the excitement caused by the release of ChatGPT by OpenAI was electric. For the first time, the public had access to a human-seeming AI that could engage in complex conversations, write songs, and – of course – help out with homework.
I recommend giving ChatGPT a try if you haven’t already! It’s great at explaining things – you can ask it about any topic and get a solid answer, often one that’s easier to understand than top Google results.
I certainly didn’t understand quantum mechanics – or the plot of that Christopher Nolan movie, Tenet – until ChatGPT explained it.
Wouldn’t it be great if aspects of your business could be presented this cleanly, explained this simply?
We thought so.
That’s why we’re proud to announce Trovata AI, which adds GPT-4 technology, OpenAI’s most advanced system, to our growing treasury toolkit.
Below, we’ll examine just how this tool, which is like a ChatGPT for finance, can accelerate your team. Ready to completely rev up the way you work?
Bridging the Gap Between ChatGPT and Finance
“Wait a second,” you might be thinking. “I thought ChatGPT can’t do math?”
It’s true that the primary innovation of ChatGPT is as a language learning model, or LLM – that’s why it’s so good at explaining things and having natural conversations. Generative AI like ChatGPT is not usually used for crunching numbers.
So how would we at Trovata make it useful to our clients in the treasury department, whose job it is to work exclusively with numbers?
As we explained in a recent Fintech Corner episode, we’ve been mulling this over since ChatGPT first made waves. The solution we’ve come up with is to merge it with a platform that does deal with numbers – our own.
Essentially, Trovata AI is a hybrid model between ChatGPT and Trovata. When you ask Trovata AI a question, it has GPT-4 use Trovata’s native capabilities on your behalf to dish up the information you’re looking for.
How do we know it’s accurate?
It’s not the GPT-4 that is doing the calculations. It’s still Trovata, and since Trovata uses your bank data, you can trust that the answers are accurate.
For example, you can ask it – as you might ask a colleague on Slack – to create reports on cash flow over the last year, or daily spend over the last week.
The main difference is, where a colleague would take hours or even a day or two to do this, Trovata AI can generate the report nearly instantaneously.
Your Data Stays Private
And, true to our promise to customers, it does all this without ever actually sharing sensitive financial data with OpenAI or any other third-party. GPT-4 has permission to use our APIs, but everything stays within Trovata.
Think of it as your own, personal, closed-loop version of ChatGPT for finance.
This new innovation combines all the benefits of ChatGPT/GPT-4 – access to huge amounts of data related to financial strategy, near-instantaneous response time, and personalized assistance – with all the benefits of Trovata – security, automated cash flow management, and deep insight into finances that, when transformed into action, propels your company to the next level.
Simplifying Cash Management with GPT-4
So, yes, with Trovata AI, you can ask questions like “What’s been my cash burn rate over the past 30 days?” or “What’s been my average free cash flow over the last 90 days?” and get an accurate answer on the spot.
But it’s more than just that. The AI can generate graphs for you, too, saving even more time on workflows. Let’s say, for example, you want to see the trend of your cash burn. For that, you need a graph, so you simply ask: “Could you put that into a line graph?”
Since the AI “remembers” what your last question was, it knows what you’re talking about – you don’t have to restate anything about “cash burn over the last 30 days.” This is the large language technology in action, which makes it seem very much like there’s another person on the other end of the chat window.
You have the graph in front of you now, but maybe you want to look at things differently – you want to know what your projected cash burn over the next 30 days is. You simply ask, “Could you put my estimated cash burn over the next 30 days into a graph?” and there it is.
If you work in the treasury department, you know these things can take a lot of time to perform manually. Trovata AI completes the tasks in seconds – as fast as you would expect any other answer from ChatGPT.
When you have data in front of you so quickly, you can make the shift from data-wrangling to data analysis – actually devising strategies to grow the business and allocate funds where they’ll do the most work.
By streamlining the finance function, Trovata AI helps make it much more effective.
The importance of the ability to quickly gather critical information can’t be understated: imagine a scenario like March of 2020, where companies were doing all they could to quickly establish their cash position. They needed to know how long they could sustain operations if revenue were to be cut by 80 or 90%.
This meant searching through spreadsheets and bank portals, double-checking, and formatting data. With Trovata AI, they could’ve simply asked for the information they were looking for.
Trovata AI – An Expert in Finance For Those Who Aren’t
Since it’s built with GPT-4, Trovata AI is fortified with a wealth of information. It’s not unfair to think of it as an expert in everything, and that includes finance. GPT-4 knows what GAAP and FBAR are. It knows the fundamentals of capital budgeting and variance analysis.
So, sure, if you have general questions, you can ask. Maybe you want to know how to hedge against foreign exchange risk – we asked it for some FX risk strategies, and it provided five.
But GPT-4 not only knows GAAP, FBAR, and what all these other things are, but it also knows how they’re done.
Case in point: while working on implementing GPT-4 into Trovata, we asked it to generate an FBAR.
FBAR is a pretty niche thing, probably known only to treasurers who work at US-based companies that do business overseas (it’s essentially a foreign bank account report for the IRS). We did not tell Trovata AI what an FBAR is, or how to create one. More importantly for this story, the ability to generate an FBAR report is not something that’s currently part of Trovata.
We asked, “Can you generate an FBAR report showing my highest balance across all accounts over the past year,” and Trovata AI knew how to do it. Imagine how much time you can save without creating IRS reports from scratch.
So, not everyone has to be a financial expert – through Trovata AI, you can utilize GPT-4 which can be the financial expert for you.
More critically to us, we found that Trovata AI understands the context of questions. It gets what you really need based on what you ask.
Trovata AI Predicts What You Want to Know
It’s not hard to imagine a situation where a CFO asks someone for a report, but leaves out specific details of what they want.
The person doing the work, say a junior accountant, brings back the report.
Maybe it’s the CFO’s fault, but something is missing, and the report has to be refined. The junior accountant grumbles – “Do I really have to put it in a pie chart?” – and, after an hour or so, comes back.
Compare that to Trovata AI. Since GPT-4 has “read” everything there is to read on finance, it can intuit what you really want, what specific metrics you’re looking for – in other words, the context of your request.
As an example, we asked it to show us our most expensive recurring transactions over the past month. This is a great way to cut down on subscription bloat – it’s pretty common these days for companies to have subscriptions to software they no longer use.
But just from the way we phrased our request, Trovata AI intuited a lot. Asking for the “largest” transactions automatically communicated that we wanted it to check all of our accounts, and “highest” implied a range.
It singled out a payment that was repeated 17 times from a particular account and put it in a table. It told us it was in USD, and gave us the average amount. All these things came together to give us the context we needed for analysis – it’s easy to imagine a junior accountant having to refine a report multiple times for this.
Find Anomalous Transactions Effortlessly
Finally, as an expert in finance, Trovata AI can even find anomalous transactions that would usually require plenty of effort to locate. You can then ask how it found this transaction, what makes it anomalous, and it’ll describe the process – just as a CFO would ask a treasurer to do.
In more ways than one, bringing a tool like ChatGPT for finance into the treasury department is very much like having an extra hand without having to pay a salary.
Trovata AI – An Added Team Member for Modern Cash Management
Trovata’s goal is to make the primary job of finance teams – data collection and analysis – easier. We do this through automating forecasting, natural language search, tagging and more.
But rather than each user having to learn how to do all this, we wondered, why not just get a version of ChatGPT to do it for them?
Trovata AI is your personalized, intelligent virtual team member who knows how to use Trovata’s functionality, and how each ability connects to the other. It’s very much in line with our mission of helping treasurers easily access data, and make sense of it as quickly as possible so they can act on it.
There’s been a lot of emphasis on the “lean team” methodology over the past 10-15 years, but – for whatever reason – treasury departments seem to be stuck in the past. We truly believe this new functionality will accelerate your finance team by providing quick access to the information you need and presenting it in an easy-to-understand format.
Still have some questions about Trovata AI? Check out our FAQ page.
Trovata AI is now available to all customers. Not using Trovata, yet? To see it in action, book a demo today.
