People turning to ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence tools for help with their finances could be a good thing for the sector.
That was the message from St James’s Place (SJP) AI lead Peter Ferguson when speaking at Money Marketing‘s conference in London yesterday (9 October).
Ferguson was part of a panel of industry experts that were discussing how the technology is shaping the future of the profession.
“If you receive medical advice from ChatGPT, you still go to the doctor, you don’t trust it or fully rely on it,” said Ferguson. “There’s still place for that human trust.”
He added: “So actually, if more people are using ChatGPT to talk about financial advice that’s a good thing for our industry – that’s an influx of potential customers for advisers.”
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Speaking on the same panel, Otto co-founder Madeleine Debney said the rise of AI means there’s “never been a more exciting time to get into the advice profession”.
“I think it’s [AI] going to radicalise [the sector] so much in the next five to ten years,” she said. “I think advisers are going to become much more entrepreneurial.”
Debney added: “I think it will become a relationship-type business, because a lot of the manual work we are doing now will all become automated.
“It will be easier to spin up what we call the next generation of wealth managers, where it’s a bit more vision and personality led and you can really grow a practice into what you want.”
She also went as far as to suggest AI could help more women become advisers.
“I think more women will get into advice as well, because with AI you have what we call an ‘always on’ economy, where your practice will still be working for you while you sleep which will adapt to the financial power in the household.”
Rowan Whittington, product director at Dynamic Planner, said she wanted to use AI to “bring advice at scale to small entrepreneurial firms.”
“We’ve been working hard over the last few years to get from 70 to 120, to 160, to 190 clients per adviser and we want that to keep going. Our goal is to help anybody that needs it get to 300.”
Debney described the implementation of AI as a a journey, adding “and we are very much on day one.”
She said so far a lot of the energy and ROI has been focused on client servicing notes, which she praised as “the right route in”.
However, she added that over time we will move further down into the advice process itself and that’s where we’ll see the benefit.”
She warned: “Any use of AI, if its embedded in the firm and not used for experimentation, should be towards a bigger vision of what you are trying to achieve.
“Whether that’s having a more personalised client experience, increasing the number of clients per adviser, it needs to be part of a bigger journey because the technology is moving so so quickly and what will happen is it will unlock those next steps.”
Helen Lovett, chief operating officer at Foster Denovo, believes the biggest benefit of AI has been the way it has captured data.
“The blocker to a lot of productivity tools has been the data that we hold,” she said.
“In the past, the only we’ve been able to able to get around that is having people actually capturing the data and ‘tip-tapping’ it into systems.
“Which is dull and actually advisers tend not to be very good at it because they are not very motivated to do it and therefore the data tends not to be very good.
“So, I think the genius of what’s going on now [with AI], is it captures data into systems without humans having to tip-tap it in.”
Ferguson added that: “The businesses that will win are the ones that don’t just augment what they do currently, but completely transform the way they operate.”
Meanwhile, Lovett said she thought “technology has suddently become interesting again, having been very dull for a very long time.”
