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How Wealth Managers Will Excel in the Age of AI

Stu Breyer, CEO of Mallowstreet

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is here and isn’t going anywhere – except to become more engrained in our daily lives. What I find most fascinating about AI is its ability to be turned to almost any task. The challenge many face now is often choice paralysis – with so many options out there, where on earth does one even start? And how can you truly measure whether time is being saved or client relationships improved? This is where focusing on the use case is absolutely essential.

Our use case: the meeting

Our journey with AI started with exploring the meeting – after all, every experiences them. And when to comes to wealth managers and financial advisers, they have even more and – crucially – each one is incredibly important. So, we asked ourselves: How can we use existing tools (or build our own) to make the entire process of a meeting become more efficient, effective, and more productive?

Our first step was to see if something like what we were after already existed. We scanned the market and didn’t see it – so, we got to work on building our own. Because the language used in financial services is unique, complex, and nuanced, we knew we had to build models that looked at conversations though the vital lenses of risk, return, liquidity, investment time horizon, income, growth, and ESG. Accurately capturing the essence of a conversation is crucial as it allows for further, accurate analysis to follow, and attuned recommendations to emerge. We built tools to let summaries be produced, and to analyse and look for common themes and questions.

Stu Breyer

Our initial users loved it, and we quickly realised everyone wanted the information from SOFI exported in a slightly different way. We swiftly added features that gave our users the power to extract the exact information that was relevant to them, in the format they wanted, and in a way that was repeatable and consistent.

Putting humans back at the heart of interactions

Each meeting is an opportunity to listen to clients to truly understand what is driving their decisions or behaviour. Good advice given at the right time to clients in their journey can have a profoundly positive effect on their financial position later on in their life.

And this is why wealth managers and financial advisers tell me they joined the industry in the first place – they want the opportunity to help their clients make good decisions today that will help them achieve their respective goals and dreams down the line. What I don’t hear from people I talk to is ‘I joined the industry so I can take copious notes, write reports, update the CRM, and fill in compliance driven checklists.’

However, all of this is required to allow advisers to do the work their jobs properly. But with AI as part of their toolkit, they can automate the time-consuming tasks and focus on truly listening, and enriching relationships in ways that only humans can.

Scaling analytical capabilities

What I’ve found the most interesting in our journey is the concept I call the ‘impact coefficient’: how an individual can achieve uplift in delivery of their core role. If a single adviser can save 90 minutes for each annual client review meeting, and they have 100 clients, this is 150 hours of time saved across one year. If the same adviser meets a further 100 potential clients a year, and again can save 90 minutes after each meeting, there is an additional 150 hours of time saved.

This is well beyond the 2% productivity gains envisioned and dreamed of by the Chancellor and the current Government. Compounding the incremental savings at scale can have a massive benefit to not only an individual, but also at a firm level, as well as more broadly with society. If we get the implementation of AI right, it is quite possible that the provision of financial advice can be made available to millions more people in the UK. Imagine that. Millions more individuals and families that have the opportunity early on in their lives to set a plan in motion that will pay dividends (literally and figuratively!) later in life.

Leading the AI revolution: one step at a time

There is an open window for wealth and financial advisers to step through to deliver meaningful change in their daily lives and their business. However, before anyone plunges headfirst into AI, it is again important to identify the use case – the exact problem you are trying to solve. Spend time thinking about what tasks or business processes will benefit the most from automation, and start with the ones that are easiest to implement. Ask yourself the question – what are the tasks of things that only I can do; the things I should be doing and focusing my energy on?

Try out tools that are available to find the one that works for you. I recommend focusing on the incremental improvements that are going to help drive efficiency across your business.

Taking the example of SOFI’s ability to help with a meeting – think about what you are going to do with the extra time saved. I strongly believe that by putting financial advisers at the forefront of innovation, and driving adoption of AI to benefit from its advantages, everyone can achieve great things – and ultimately, millions more people will be able to access financial advice.

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