Aveni, the artificial intelligence (AI) fintech business has announced the release of a new platform, Aveni Assist.
It aims to enhance the productivity of an adviser by up to three times.
Aveni Assist, the AI assistant, has been designed specifically for the financial advice market to transform administrative tasks.
The firm’s CEO Joseph Twigg told Money Marketing that “Aveni Assist is the very start as we are wrapping AI around the human adviser”.
It is claimed Aveni Assist can cut adviser administrative tasks down from three hours to around 30 minutes.
The company added that “Aveni Assist revolutionises” an adviser’s workflow freeing up valuable hours to focus on the most important aspect of their work that is clients.
Comparison site money.co.uk found that in the UK consumer debt is increasing as 34% of people have no savings or less than £1,000 in a savings account.
Also over a third have no or very little pensions provision for later life.
Aveni said the roll-out of AI in the adviser market could help reduce costs and potentially decrease the advice gap.
Twigg went to on to say Aveni Assist runs on the same foundation model/engine as ChatGPT as they are both large language systems.
Aveni previously launched Aveni Detect to help financial services firms meet the Consumer Duty regulations.
Twigg said that Aveni Detect works as a “compliance check list” to make sure an adviser has covered all the Consumer Duty regulations.
In May 2023, Schroders Personal Wealth (SPW) selected the Aveni Detect platform and its natural language processing (NLP) based technology to monitor client interactions and produce data-led evidence of compliance.
This move according to SPW helps to lower its cost to serve as well as provide risk management for advisers.
The Financial Conduct Authority has called on companies to invest more in technology to ensure future regulatory requirements are met.
Twigg added: “We started Aveni with the vision to deliver technology solutions that could really transform the financial services sector.
“The advice side of this sector has been slow to adopt technology over the years, resulting in highly manual processes and a high cost to serve.
“The introduction of safe and transparent large language models (LLMs) has the genuine capability to transform this. Aveni Assist is the start of this transformation.
“With our combination of extensive financial services expertise and world leading NLP capability we are uniquely positioned and very excited to drive forward the AI-powered productivity revolution in the UK wealth & advice market.”
Twigg pointed out that the UK financial advice market is the perfect place to start.
“The combination of persistent productivity challenges and the fact that the UK market is so underserved (20 million people in the advice gap) makes solutions like Aveni Assist a win-win.”
He also said that recent approaches to tackle the advice gap with technology have largely failed with the prime example being robo advice.
Consumers want to speak to people when making important financial decisions which is why Aveni Assist has been designed to almost completely eliminate administration, allowing for more client conversations, he continued.
“But the approach needs to be transparent, that information is reliable, and bias is removed to ensure the trust of those deploying it and the consumers engaging with it,” he said.
Twigg also revealed that he was recently in a meeting with FCA chief executive Nikhil Rathi where he discussed the advice gap and the use of technology.
Twigg said: “The FCA are cautious about regulation getting in the way of innovation”.
