Over the next month, X will begin rolling out X Money. This is a new payments solution that will let users hold cash and make payments. Initially it will be in fiat currencies but there appear to be other plans to launch crypto too.
At the same time, X’s Head of Product – Nikita Bier – said in February that the company will launch crypto and stock trading directly from within the social media platform. Bier did note that “X is not handling trade execution or acting as a brokerage. Just building the financial data tools and links.”
What the ultimate X finance app will look like is hard to say. However, one interesting point is that the company is now hiring for a huge number of financial specialist roles for its AI product.
The roles in question largely revolve around what would normally be trading, investing, and investment banking roles in regular financial institutions. Broadly speaking, you can imagine people from hedge funds, asset managers, and investment bankers taking on these roles. You can see some of them below:
The roles include equity analysis, M&A structuring, compliance knowledge, and even quant trading.
Almost all of the jobs have the same spec – X is looking for very specific subject matter expertise, which can then be used to train X’s AI tools. Presumably this will be the company’s LLM platform Grok.
You could argue there is nothing to this. X hires lots of people and will need to train its AI technology across different areas of human interest. The problem with this line of reasoning is that the only other area where the company is hiring in this way is in the sciences, where the company is also hiring for a wide range of specialists.
In practice, it could mean that the goal of the company is to build a more specialised product that can be used by professionals in those areas. For instance, if you are doing equity research, you could very easily put a company report into Grok and then get back all the information you need.
What’s perhaps more interesting is if this will be combined with the trading infrastructure the company says it’s building. A couple of brokers, notably eToro and Trading 212, have already opened up their APIs to AI platforms.
If you had a more advanced system, which is simply better than its other AI competitors, it’s easy to see a user being able to do fairly advanced analysis within Grok and then place trades. It’s early days but it could be coming.
