That most trendy of things, ‘artificial intelligence’ (AI), is increasingly being used in the wealth management arena and technology solutions company Finantix has developed and delivered AI solutions within the industry for the last five years.
Alessandro Tonchia, Founder and Director at Finantix, reports that 43 per cent of wealth management professionals globally see AI technology as having the potential to improve business performance and reduce conduct and client risk.
His firm has a customer base in over 40 countries and more than 200 staff. Its sales and advisory software is used by firms such as UBS, Rothschild Bank, Standard Chartered, Manulife and Banco Itau.
Tonchia launched his firm almost 20 years ago but it is especially in the last few years that wealth managers embraced digital technology for sales and advice, allowing advisers to better understand their clients and build more personalised and suitable proposals.
“We are a pure product company and our solution incorporates best practices in effective client acquisition and expansion of assets under management as well as in providing pro-active and compliant advice” Tonchia says.
“We support wealth managers with portals and tools that allow advisers to manage prospects and clients and digitally collaborate with them in defining optimal investment and financial planning approaches.”
“In the last three years, we have launched AI tools that can make the entire process smoother, more compliant and efficient.”
As examples, AI is used to automatically profile leads and prospects, and to help prepare for a meeting in terms of suggesting top agenda topics and relevant materials, and to highlight research and news that might be most relevant to a specific client.
“Our approach is not to look for ‘big’ AI but rather to focus on easy to implement tools that can save a minute or two on tasks that advisers repeat many times a day.
“It makes advisers more effective and professional and, by removing low value tasks, allows them to focus on the more human aspects of client management,” Tonchia says.
“For a lot of the users, it feels like having an intelligent assistant. It will add value by finding you more leads and highlighting clients that need some action, rather than forcing you to change the way in which you work.
“Another relevant example is a tool that scans meeting notes and transcripts, automatically recognising tasks and future meetings and putting them into your diary and to do list.”
While current technology can easily help increase productivity and ensure investment and conduct compliance, in the future it will help generate better holistic advice.
“We are starting to look at how AI can support complex financial planning and tax advice.” Tonchia says. “Sometimes a junior adviser will struggle to detect client needs and opportunities in areas such as estate planning: AI can raise their level of proficiency in those initial discussions.”
Tonchia believes AI usage in the wealth industry will continue to grow. “If you focus on the low hanging fruit of AI and select use cases that are relevant to your business, you can achieve significant returns on your technology investment and at the same time become better prepared for the future waves of change in our industry.”
