Financial advisors have been increasingly incorporating the use of artificial intelligence into their practices to maximize its positive impact, according to a report by InvestmentNews.
The advantages of Generative AI have become clear to firms as the technology has grown more advanced in recent years, said Scott Reddel, capital markets and wealth management managing director at Accenture. Reddel was quoted as saying, ““What’s been really powerful about Gen AI is not just the automation of mechanical tasks, but its ability to embed a degree of intelligence and judgment that advisors typically have had to do themselves.”
Forbes has previously reported that 85% of financial institutions currently use artificial intelligence in some capacity, including for detecting fraud and predicting cash flow events. Reddel noted that an Accenture report four years showed over 90% of financial advisors believing that AI could grow their businesses by at least 20%, and the technology has only continued to evolve since then.
Other advisors interviewed in the report pointed out that AI has been utilized for handling certain day-to-day tasks more efficiently including preparing presentations for clients and answering questions to the firm, thus freeing up more time for personal interactions with clients.
One company, Bluespring Wealth Partners, launched a new program called Blueprint for Growth that includes the use of AI-powered lead optimization to help stimulate growth among its partner firms. According to Bluespring Wealth Partners COO Angela Osborne, the initiative is part of its effort to build efficiencies throughout its network. “Essentially, we’re offering a ‘time machine’ that allows our advisors to focus their precious time more efficiently on those ideal target leads most likely to become a client,” Osborne said.
AI is also being employed to generate emails to prospective clients, according to Elevated Wealth Advisory’s owner and advisor Andrew Kacz. He said the firm is using Catchlight, which helps firms by predicting which leads are most likely to convert. According to Kacz, Catchlight is building profiles of individuals in the company’s leads, and “is then able to pull from the data in those profiles and generate email outreach that is specific to the financial concerns that the recipients may have,”
Reddel said one of the biggest advantages of Gen AI is organizing all the information contained within firms and curating it to make it more accessible to advisors, employees and clients. But he noted that more needs to be done to ensure the security and privacy of the information being pulled from the system.
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