Montreal, August 30, 2022 – Desjardins, the largest financial cooperative in North America, and Mila, the world's largest academic deep learning research centre, announce a three-year strategic partnership that will benefit all Desjardins members and clients in the long term.
The agreement includes three main components:
- A unique collaboration for development and research in artificial intelligence (AI) and deep learning within an ethical and responsible framework
- Privileged access to the Mila community (more than 900 student researchers and professors as well as many industry partners and startups)
- An exclusive offer for Desjardins business members that includes services, advice and support from Mila experts
The partnership also includes a corporate lab of 10 workstations entirely dedicated to Desjardins in Mila’s Montreal office spaces, as well as access to the Institute's common areas. This will facilitate a close link between Desjardins's artificial intelligence needs and the work carried out at Mila.
This is a one-of-a-kind partnership in Canada. The agreement strengthens Desjardins's position as a driver of innovation: artificial intelligence without compromise in terms of ethics and social responsibility.
"Artificial intelligence is key to providing a better experience for our 7.5 million members and clients. We want our business members who have the potential to break into international markets to benefit from Mila's technology and support. It's a game changer for SMEs that might not have access to such services." - Guy Cormier, President and CEO of Desjardins Group
“This partnership with Desjardins will allow us to welcome a leading institution in Quebec's financial sector to our community and have the opportunity to build relationships with many SMEs with great AI potential.” - Stéphane Létourneau, Executive Vice-President at Mila
About Desjardins Group
Desjardins Group is the largest cooperative financial group in North America and the fifth largest cooperative financial group in the world, with assets of $404 billion. In 2022, it was named one of Canada's Top 100 Employers by Mediacorp. To meet the diverse needs of its members and clients, Desjardins offers a full range of products and services to individuals and businesses through its extensive distribution network, online platforms and subsidiaries across Canada. Ranked among the world's strongest banks according to The Banker magazine, Desjardins has some of the highest capital ratios and credit ratings in the industry.
About Mila
Founded in 1993 by Université de Montréal Professor Yoshua Bengio, Mila is now an AI research institute that brings together nearly 900 researchers studying machine learning. Montreal-based Mila's mission is to be a global hub for scientific advances that inspires innovation and AI developments that benefit everyone. Mila is a not-for-profit organization recognized worldwide for its major contributions to the field of deep learning, including language modelling, machine translation, object recognition and generative models. To learn more, visit mila.quebec/en/
