The role of AI tools in financial advice

Citywire recently asked financial advisory firms about their use of AI tools and their strengths and weaknesses. Aleah Townsend, our Head of Account Management was asked for her views:

This story was published by Citywire New Model Adviser on Wednesday 22nd April.

AI tools in financial advice – the benefits and drawbacks

Common among advice firms is Saturn, which transcribes client meetings and produces notes, drafts suitability letters and provides compliance for advisers.

Connor Broadley, a London-based firm, has used the service for several months. It had used different models, including Planner Pal, but found Saturn to be the best fit for its business.

Aleah Townsend, the firm’s head of account management, said the tools thus far have provided a ‘great speed’ and ‘use of data’ that has improved the firm’s efficiencies and has helped across the board.

While they are not yet using it to write suitability letters, it has been deployed to aid with meeting notes and transcriptions.

Townsend said Saturn’s advantage over other services is that it is able to differentiate between clients and can pick up on different characteristics and goals of clients.

‘I think where it differentiates, and Saturn’s fantastic at this, is it picks up the individual goals of that individual client and then it can cater towards that.

‘So in terms of the suitability process behind it, as I mentioned, the recommendation part is still being done by advisers at present.

‘But what we’re doing is we’re actually using their tool named meeting assistant and our advisers are using that to fact check what has happened in the meetings against what we’ve written in the suitability reports to make sure that we are meeting the objectives thereafter.’

Advice businesses are constantly running into difficulties trying to integrate with back-office systems, such as XPlan and Intelliflo. Townsend said that she hopes one day AI will allow firms to cut out those difficulties and see AI itself be able to restructure data.

‘Could we get to a realm where we no longer need CRM (customer relationship management) systems? If we’re at a point where we can use AI to gather unstructured data and put it into a structured format, I’d like to see it taking over some of the players like XPlan, who are notoriously bad to integrate with,’ she said.

Some advice firms however have declined to integrate AI into their processes, fearing a potential data breach or not feeling as though it is yet accurate enough to aid with advice processes.

To read the full story please click below: Which AI tools IFAs use (and what do they think of them)