Rize Capital Becomes Official Research Partner of the University of Oxford
June 8, 2025
A New Milestone for European AI Innovation in Private Wealth
Rize Capital, the European startup revolutionizing financial decision-making through large language models (LLMs), proudly announces its official research partnership with the University of Oxford. This collaboration will address one of the most pressing questions for private investors in Europe:
Can we trust general-purpose AI with complex financial decisions?
Why Asking LLMs About Investments Is Risky Business
The rise of generative AI has led many private investors to turn to tools like ChatGPT for investment guidance. But is that wise?
According to the FinanceBench Benchmark study (2024), general-purpose LLMs answered over 81% of investment-related financial questions incorrectly. The study, conducted across multiple financial domains, revealed that while LLMs demonstrate fluent language capabilities, they often hallucinate or misunderstand the regulatory, contextual, and factual intricacies essential for sound investment advice.
A major underlying issue is that traditional LLMs lack real-time access to licensed, official stock market and financial data. Without direct API connectivity to verified, regulatory-compliant data sources, these models must rely on outdated or unverified content scraped from the open web, leading to misleading or even dangerous conclusions.
The Rize Approach: Domain-Specific Learning Meets Research-Driven Insight
Unlike general-purpose models, Rize trains its LLMs exclusively on verified financial content curated from trusted, regulated sources, including licensed feeds from stock exchanges and financial authorities. Rize is one of the very few startups in Europe with direct API integrations into official market data, enabling models to reason over live, accurate numbers.
But it doesn't stop there: Rize also introduces a novel research and analysis flow. Investor questions are not just answered, They are analyzed, categorized, and structurally matched to the right financial datasets. This allows the LLM to filter and narrow down the scope of data before generating a response. Rather than letting the model blindly search an ocean of data for every possible insight, Rize focuses its attention with surgical precision.
The collaboration with Oxford enables deeper investigation into how private investors ask, what they prioritize, and where AI systems fall short.
Through our research partnership, Rize and Oxford will analyze thousands of anonymized investor queries submitted via the Rize platform. The goal: to identify latent patterns, emergent themes, and gaps in AI understanding that are invisible to current evaluation methods."
What Private Investors Want: Precision, Trust, Context
Our early findings suggest that European retail investors want more than just "good enough" answers. They seek trustworthy, context-aware guidance, and not generic advice.
Questions range from:
"How does Basel III affect bond risk in my portfolio?"
"What are the long-term implications of ECB rate shifts on SME valuations?"
"Can I optimize my ETF exposure under new tax law reforms in Germany?"
These are not the kinds of prompts that general LLMs were trained to handle. Rize is changing that.
Scaling Intelligence for the Real Financial World
By mapping real-world user queries and benchmarking them against system performance, Rize is developing the next generation of financial reasoning engines. These models are not just linguistically fluent. They are legally, economically, and contextually accurate.
"The partnership with Oxford supercharges our research capabilities and aligns perfectly with our mission: empowering European investors with precise, AI-driven financial intelligence."
— Tammo Elsner, CEO & Founder, Rize Capital
About Rize Capital
Rize Capital is a European AI startup dedicated to transforming personal investing through high-accuracy, finance-specific large language models. Built on real investor questions, Rize enables better decisions with fewer assumptions and more relevance.
About the University of Oxford
Founded in the 12th century, Oxford is one of the world’s most prestigious institutions for academic research and teaching. Its Department of Computer Science and Oxford Internet Institute are globally recognized for their pioneering work on ethics, AI, and the societal impact of emerging technologies.
