According to authors,Machine-Learning, a subset of Artificial Intelligence (AI), is applied by firms in evaluating  financial decisions like assessing credit worthiness and eligibility criteria for an insurance policy, fraud prevention, by tracking fraud indicative transactions, thereby reducing the fraud rate, risk management, tasks of compliance, natural language processing, where this system can shift through thousands of commercial- loan contracts in seconds  and trading, where it is used both to crunch market data and to select and trade portfolios of securities. In the quantitative front, machine-learning algorithm , helped in making investment decisions, by picking up acquisitions before announcement, managing the client money and moving beyond the boundaries of conventional trading strategy. Read more at http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21722685-fields-trading-credit-assessment-fraud-prevention-machine-learning?zid=291&ah=906e69ad01d2ee51960100b7fa502595