IBM is set to acquire Promontory Financial, a Washington-based financial consulting firm, as part of a broader effort to use artificial intelligence to analyse regulations and provide advice to financial institutions.

The computer maker said it was launching a new unit, Watson Financial Services, that would seek to harness the power of Watson, its artificial intelligence computer system, to advise clients on risk and compliance.

IBM has suffered from falling revenues over the past four years as its core computer business declines, and Ginni Rometty, its chief executive, has tried to counteract this by focusing on new business areas such as analytics and cloud services. The company has been spending aggressively to invest in these areas, making $5bn worth of acquisitions in the first six months of this year, although it did not disclose the price tag for the Promontory deal.