Brazilians are jumping into investing.
A new wave of individual investors has emerged in the heart of Brazil's bustling markets, ready to navigate the complex world of finance. According to the Brazilian stock exchange B3 (Brazil, Bolsa, Balcan), the number has surged from about 600,000 in 2017 to about 5 million currently. And those ages 25 to 39 (generally millennials) make up nearly half of them.
To help these novice investors with too little balances for a professional financial advisor, B3 decided to supplement its free online investment education with a conversational AI assistant.
B3's Co-Pilot does not provide stock information, investment advice, or broker recommendations. Instead, it's a quick, direct way to decipher financial terms that may sound foreign and provide curated answers from B3 experts. We can explain how to find stocks, bonds, brokers, as well as more complex financial products.
“There is a lot of information on the Internet, but it is difficult to find the right content,” says Christianne Bariquelli, Superintendent of B3. He refers to assistants as the bridge between knowledge and action. “This solution is for Brazilians who have already invested but are at the beginning of their journey, or for those who want to invest but lack the necessary information. Some investors need a secure source of information to verify offers they receive from financial institutions or the Internet. We want our AI assistants to provide secure information from the source.”
![Christianne Bariquelli stands in front of a huge black screen that displays ticker symbols in vivid colors.](https://news.microsoft.com/source/latam/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/christianne-bariquelli-2-1024x683.jpg)
Bariquelli attributes the renewed interest in investing to three factors. “Financial education is closer to the mainstream. Technology has improved. Opening a digital brokerage account has become much easier and people can do it on their own. And between 2018 and 2021, interest rates fell to levels that people have never experienced in Brazil,” she says.
The median amount invested decreased from 4,300 reals in 2021 to 2,200 reals at the end of 2023. B3 sees this as a sign of the democratization of the stock market in recent years. Because this means that the investment is being adopted by the middle class and not by the middle class. Just rich.
It is called a savings account. Saving, which looked attractive because interest rates in Brazil were long in the double digits as part of efforts to curb inflation. The number of investors is incredibly small compared to the 20 million Brazilians who have savings accounts. Now that inflation is subsiding and interest rates are falling in Brazil, Brazilians are looking for alternative ways to earn higher returns.
“In Brazil, very few people invest.” says Marcos Garavini Siffert, an engineer at Bauru who organizes an investment club with his college friends. “In the recent past, it was easy to make money by doing nothing. [the rate after deducting inflation] It was high. That's no longer reality. now Saving Compared to inflation, you're paying one of the lowest returns, although it's not negative. But it's easy to invest Saving And people will die largely illiterate about investing instead of trying to get positive returns.”
Siffert has studied investment principles for years, but says B3's AI assistant “can be leveraged to help people feel safe enough to structure their thinking processes from the get-go, and safe enough to steer clear of risk.” Saving And we enter this new world.”
![Headshot of investor Marcos Garavani Siffert.](https://news.microsoft.com/source/latam/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/marcos-siffert-2.jpg)
Even though it's free, the information is of high quality, Siffert says. He found a report about AI assistants from private banks. He said, “Even people with very little can access reports in a sophisticated way they never could before.”
B3's free educational services include articles, videos, and online courses. The advantage of AI assistants is that individuals can ask questions and get answers immediately. Questions may include “What are stocks?” or “How can I save to invest?” or “What is an ETF?” The AI tool generates simple answers consisting of several sentences. To dive deeper into a specific topic, investors may prefer to read one of B3's articles or take one of its courses. But while doing so, if you come across a term you don't understand, the AI tool can immediately explain it to you.
The AI assistant was first trained with B3's own training materials and news content, and then B3 teamed up with Brazil's content-rich securities market regulator Comissão de Valores Mobiliários. B3 has expanded to include information from our partners, including bankers, brokers, and select influencers, all of which has been reviewed and approved by B3 experts.
B3 does not track AI assistant users, but it analyzes answers to ensure they are appropriate and within B3 boundaries.
“The team retrains the solution every day to improve and fix the answers,” says Marcos Albino Rodrigues, Director of Architecture, Data and Technology Innovation at B3. “It adds an ethical layer to ensure we don’t act in a discriminatory way and make investment recommendations,” he said. “I received training to become a financial educator.”
![Marcos Albino Rodrigues stands in front of a huge black screen that displays ticker symbols and graphs in vivid colors.](https://news.microsoft.com/source/latam/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/marcos-albino-rodrigues-2-1024x683.jpg)
B3 understood that generative AI could be helpful as an educational tool as soon as it hit the market. “Sometimes people don’t watch the entire video or don’t get to the end of the article,” says Bariquelli. “AI assistants are more comfortable and more specific about what you are looking for.”
B3 Chief Technology Officer Ricardo Nardoni had a vision that B3 needed to increase its investment messaging, and leveraged B3's relationship with Microsoft to develop an AI assistant.
AI assistants run on Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service through Azure AI Search for all documents. This goes further than traditional chatbots that only answer every question one way and don't explain the abbreviations and complex names that make financial markets so difficult. Generative AI allows for more natural conversations by being able to spell and explain unfamiliar terms when needed, tailored to the user's level of education.
Launched in February, the AI assistant already supports 10,000 users a day and is receiving “very positive feedback from users, especially on social networks,” says Rodriguez. B3 is careful about social media mentions because we do not collect user information on our website.
B3 is exploring new ways to spread the use of its AI investment assistant, such as providing a widget that others, such as banks and brokerages, can post on their websites. This is because users can see that B3 has reviewed their answers.
Getting Brazilians to invest in stocks and bonds is important not only for B3 but also for the future of the Brazilian economy. “As Brazil’s capital markets become stronger, growing companies can turn to the stock market to access capital,” says Bariquelli.
According to a World Bank report, banks are essential for economic growth, supporting businesses and reducing poverty, but capital markets in the form of debt (bonds) and equity (stocks) are especially important in helping new businesses grow. It can help increase productivity and create new jobs. Governments also rely on capital markets to issue government bonds to pay for large costs, such as building infrastructure. B3 wants more investors to buy Brazilian government bonds, a lower-risk investment that could yield better returns than Poupanças, Bariquelli said.
“We believe that financial education and new investors are directly linked to making the Brazilian economy better. Because access to capital allows businesses to grow, new employers to hire, and people to save.”
Top image: Christianne Bariquelli, Superintendent of B3, and Marcos Albino Rodrigues, Director of Architecture, Data and Technology Innovation at B3, helped develop an AI assistant for the Brazilian stock exchange that answers questions from investors. The number of new investors in Brazil has increased more than eightfold in just a few years, and B3 wanted to provide them with free financial education. Photo by Avener Prado for Microsoft.