How AI will reshape wealth management career paths
Advisors need to sharpen their tech and human skills to keep up with the industry’s transformation.
Of the various megatrends reshaping wealth management, artificial intelligence (AI) could well be the biggest. It will automate away mundane repetitive tasks, pave the way for advisors to devote more of their time to client relationships, level the playing field for smaller firms, and open the door to a vastly expanded investment opportunity set.
“Ten years ago, we were asking whether robot advisors would take our jobs,” said Helena Eaton, CFA, Investment Advisor at Bedrock Group. Ten years on, it’s become clear that rather than leading to large-scale redundancies across the industry, technology and AI in particular will spur a wholesale reimagining of the careers within it.
“It doesn’t matter whether your role is client-facing or support,” said Eaton. “The industry will be changing, so you have to evolve with it to stay relevant and to make sure that as technology takes a bigger part of the work which you are doing now day-to-day, you should do something else to make sure that you remain relevant.”
Eaton was speaking at a CFA Institute webinar on the future of private wealth management. She was joined by Chris Cutler, CFA, President, Manager Analysis Group, who observed that recent AI advances have been remarkably democratized.
“The gap in technologies between smaller advisors and larger advisors has narrowed,” said Cutler. For example, he said advisors serving clients with investable assets of between USD1 million and USD25 million now have access to similar quantitative tools as private banks.
Still, while AI could be a great equalizer for the industry, smaller firms with fewer dedicated tech talent need to be especially vigilant about using it. In addition to the common errors committed when extracting patterns and insights from large sets of data, a report by CFA Institute Research and Policy Center on Explainable AI in Finance highlighted deeper concerns. For example, the deep learning models applied to investment and portfolio management suffer from a lack of explicability and are susceptible to “hallucinations,” which can lead to misinformed decisions and financial losses. All firms must also be careful about avoiding the whiff of “AI-washing” or falsely or overly inflating claims about the use of AI in their products or services.
Uplifting work
In this new paradigm, wealth management careers will arguably become more fulfilling. As with investment managers, advisors who cultivate AI skills will have a clear advantage when applying for jobs. And human skills will become more important than ever.
Another recent CFA Institute webinar on how AI and fintech are transforming wealth management provided details on specific AI tools available to the industry, ranging from document filing and quarterly reporting, to portfolio balancing and sending highly personalized marketing communications to existing and prospective clients.
“You'll be able to outsource nearly everything you don’t want to be doing day-to-day,” said Eden Ovadia, Co-Founder & CEO of FINNY, an AI prospecting platform for financial advisors. “That will enable you to manage a much larger book of business in a much more scalable and efficient way.”
“You’re going to be able to see advisors dedicate nearly 100% of their time on the human-to-human aspect of their jobs,” added Ovadia. “Client meetings, hosting events, prospecting in person – the human touch is going to become a lot more important."
That means current and would-be advisors need to shore up their human skills, including being able to “lead a meeting effectively, to communicate with clients in a really personable, open way, to just build relationships,” said Ovadia. “All of those things are not going to be replaced with AI. So that's what I would be focusing on.”
Bhargav Shivarthy, Founder and CEO of data analytics firm Parsym, advised prospective wealth managers to gain an edge in the job hunt by acquainting themselves with the AI tools that can be used in financial analysis. “When you go into an interview and tell them about tools they might not even know about, you’re an asset.”
Shivarthy highlighted how AI could help wealth managers and their clients tap into a much bigger investment universe. “You’re going to have AI that surfaces interesting opportunities in private and public markets,” he said.
In private markets, AI will make it much cheaper and easier to conduct due diligence by trawling through seas of unstructured data. In public markets, it will help bring to light many small- and mid-cap companies currently flying under the radar. ”That’s kind of where the alpha is,” said Shivarthy. “You couldn’t analyze the long tail of companies without AI.”
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