By John Sweeney, President, AlphaTrAI
“The companies that succeed … will be those that most effectively use AI. If you’re making maximum use of AI, competing against someone who is not, you will win”
– Elon Musk
The wealth and asset management industries have been a hotbed of technology innovation for decades. Professional and individual investors alike have benefitted from the “democratization” of financial services via online trading and payments, and the migration of transactions to the cloud and mobile devices, all in an environment of ever-greater transparency and precision.
These technologies have triggered a “leveling” of institutional and individual client service. Retail retirement savers today enjoy many attributes of professionally-managed defined benefit pensions via the target-date funds in their defined contribution savings accounts. And throughout this process, the industry has grown more competitive, pressuring money managers to constantly invest in order to stay ahead of the innovation curve.
Artificial intelligence is today revolutionizing fintech with unprecedented speed and transformative force. For wealth and asset managers that want to survive and thrive, the embrace of AI isn’t a matter of choice – it’s literally a matter of life and death.
Transforming Money Management Practice
The previous rounds of innovation, built around faster networks, software and mobile apps, focused on executing individual tasks more efficiently and transparently. Many large consultancies and technology firms are similarly marketing their AI as a software product. “Here’s the tool, and here’s what you can do with it.” But in the age of AI, we need to move on from product-centric to service-centric strategies
Artificial intelligence permeates deeply into company data, business functions and practices, learning as it goes guiding users to new and evolving best practices. The “generative” function of AI evolves through multiple stages of training, evaluation and refinement. AI models are deployed on both public and private datasets, including structured and unstructured text, images and audio.
Artificial intelligence is already undertaking many of the tasks formerly parceled out to young research associates. And while every new generation of human workers must earn the unique business processes of companies before they can make value-added contributions AI “agents” learn more rapidly, retain information more precisely, constantly deepen their understanding and establish ever-smarter “rules” that can be applied to downstream projects.
AI and Customized Solutions
In asset management and wealth management, we are rapidly moving beyond the era of off-the-shelf software and on to mass customization – in both business practice and client strategies. This degree of technology customization has historically been unavailable to all but the largest firms. But the learning algorithms of AI dramatically reduce the cost of customization, foretelling a new era of cost efficiency and practice excellence for thousands of financial firms that had previously been at a technology disadvantage.
The varied uses of AI in this area are too numerous to mention. They embrace front, back and middle office. AI facilitates customer identification and servicing, product design, investment strategies, content creation and burdensome (but necessary) regulatory communication and compliance. Perhaps most intriguing, AI can take over many time-consuming and low value-add tasks that have always been the least-favorite parts of every financial professional’s job, thereby freeing up their time for higher value activities.
Asset and wealth management are professional fields with a diverse and long-term range of functions. in an effort to cover these diverse functions, individual financial applications have proliferated for years, leading to “choice chaos” in which money managers must constantly scramble in-and-out of applications for capital-raising, CRM, client development, planning, portfolio management and rebalancing, compliance and regulatory reporting and more.
Keeping up with this technology Tower-of-Babel can be expensive, and these costs fall on the back of wealth managers, not the software providers. Amid these rising technology costs, and without massive scale, many smaller wealth managers have buckled under pressure and closed up shop. AI offers systemic efficiencies that could reverse this trend.
AI Avoidance is Not an Option
AI innovation is washing over business, government, academia and every other sphere of life. And wealth and asset managers understand off-the-shelf large language models (LLMs) and other general purpose AI tools cannot be quickly or easily deployed to their specific business processes. While experimenting with generative AI is a lot of fun, it’s no way to transform a business.
The way forward is to seek out industry partners, consultants and technology firms that understand both money management and applied artificial intelligence, and that can deploy this knowledge through tailored strategies. There has always been a fintech sweet spot where technology, wealth management and asset management converge. AI is rolling out with startling speed, making clear that AI-engagement is a make-or-break business priority critical to both success and survival.
John Sweeney, President of AlphaTrAI, combines a deep background in finance and investments with advanced technologies including ai and blockchain to revolutionize wealth and asset management. Formerly of Fidelity Investments and Figure Technologies, John is dedicated to creating tailored solutions that boost performance and drive meaningful change for financial institutions.
