Notable quotes from finance and markets speakers at the Reuters NEXT conference
Dec 3 : Reuters is hosting the two-day Reuters NEXT conference in New York on Wednesday and Thursday, bringing together more than 700 international business leaders and policymakers to examine the biggest issues facing society, business and the world.
The following are some notable quotes from speakers in the finance and markets sessions of the conference.
MICHAL KATZ, MIZUHO AMERICAS HEAD OF INVESTMENT AND CORPORATE BANKING
"AI is still in the early innings of its evolution, and obviously valuations have been stretched, just given the dollars going into capex and companies wanting a stake in the game. We have seen risks arise over potential overbuild, concentration among certain off-takers, and questions about whether returns will materialize. But it’s early days—the story of AI is still being written. Winners have yet to be defined."
UMESH SUBRAMANIAN, CITADEL CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER
"We try to make sure that AI doesn't go into the land of prediction. It goes into the land of seeing today clearly."
BRENDAN COUGHLIN, PRESIDENT OF CITIZENS FINANCIAL GROUP
"The industry is ripe for further consolidation and a lot of this tech discussion we've had is going to favor folks with more scale. There's been some M&A in 2025. There's a lot of discussion around that heating up. I think you know (by) December 31, 2026, there will be less deals than people imagine."
JOHN STECHER, BLACKSTONE CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER
"We are really looking at these tools as augmenting all of our great people," Stecher said, in response to a question about applications of artificial intelligence.
Stecher said large language models were good at extracting information from documents and putting it together so that "somebody can actually read it and decide, 'is this a deal I actually want to take a look at or not?'"
Those models are currently equivalent to "high-school-level people" in their ability to make decisions, Stecher said, but they augment people's work.
"It's like the Iron Man suit around everybody, every man and woman that works inside the firm, it just makes them more effective."
RICK WURSTER, CHARLES SCHWAB CEO
"Our clients' wealth is at an all-time high. A lot of our clients are asking us about how to protect that wealth. Many have grown their balances beyond what they might have hoped for given what the markets have done."
"M&A will be something we're going to keep our eyes out for. If we can add a capability that appeals to our clients, it's going to add enormous value to the company with the size of our asset base and client base. If we acquire a capability that appeals to them, the value in that is huge."
SINEAD COLTON GRANT, CHIEF INVESTMENT OFFICER AT BNY WEALTH MANAGEMENT
“The circularity of investment is something that we are watching very closely because that does appear that almost the sprinkling of a little bit of AI stardust in other names has been, in the short term, very helpful to valuations or very helpful to the stock price, but you need to see the fundamentals come through."
MARK HAEFELE, CHIEF INVESTMENT OFFICER, UBS GLOBAL WEALTH MANAGEMENT
"I don't think you could say AI is the determinant on what the U.S. growth is. But was AI very important to the growth that we did have? Yes, of course it was. And everybody is an AI investor whether they know it or not. It's like 37 per cent of the MSCI World is tied to AI. So you've got to get that trade right for ‘26.”
ANNE DINNEEN, CHIEF INVESTMENT OFFICER AT NEW YORK-PRESBYTERIAN HOSPITAL
“When you're allocating capital, you have to think about the return expectation of each asset class or sub-asset class, but also the (volatility) expectation. Venture has a very high-vol expectation and you're seeing an innovation cycle play on the public market. So yeah, you should expect higher vol,” Dinneen said, when asked about a possible AI bubble.
SHOAIB KHAN, CHIEF INVESTMENT OFFICER AT THE NEW JERSEY DIVISION OF INVESTMENT
Speaking about private credit, he said he is not concerned about the growth, but the arrival of retail to the asset class was a red flag. “When you have a large pool of capital or a lot of capital chasing deals and chasing opportunities, you tend to see a compression in returns.”
View the live broadcast of the World Stage here and read full coverage here.
(Compiled by Pritam Biswas, Ateev Bhandari and Arasu Kannagi Basil in Bengaluru; Editing by Rod Nickel and Matthew Lewis)
