Here’s How Financial Advisors Are Using AI in Their Businesses Right Now
Artificial intelligence has gone from a novelty to a practical tool at wealth management firms. Here’s how it’s being used.
Artificial intelligence has moved quickly from a novelty to a practical business tool. Retailers use it to generate personalized product recommendations. Manufacturers rely on it for predictive equipment maintenance. And healthcare companies use AI to make more accurate diagnoses. How is artificial intelligence being put to work in the wealth management field? For this week’s Barron’s Advisor Big Q, we put the question to three leaders in the field as well as a consultant.
John O’Connell, founder and CEO, The Oasis Group consultancy: The No. 1 AI application for most RIAs—not counting the really big ones with $25 billion and up—is note taking. A lot of firms have looked at AI and said, “I can use this to reduce the amount of time advisors spend taking notes during client calls and then summarizing them afterward.” Many advisors would say that if they spent one hour in a client meeting for an annual review, they would take notes for that one hour, and then they would usually spend between two and three hours documenting those notes, cleaning them up, putting them into their CRM and then sending action items to their team. So the note takers allowed advisors to reduce two to three hours’ worth of work to maybe half an hour’s worth of work.
The second big use case among RIAs is client communications. What we’re finding is that a lot of advisors use either ChatGPT or Claude, or in some cases Perplexity, to write to clients. A lot of advisors will tell you, “If I’ve got to write a direct email to a client, but I don’t want to sound like a jerk, I’m going to write that email, then run it through Claude or ChatGPT and say, ‘make this nicer,’ or ‘elevate the tone of the email.’”
Ritik Malhotra, founder and CEO, Savvy Wealth: Everyone is doing the meeting notes and summary stuff. We are able to take that and extract tasks and action items from it, and actually automate some of the execution. One part of our foundational incorporation of AI was taking meeting notes on the call if the client agrees—a transcription that then becomes a summary. From there we went deeper. With all the client data in one place, we’re able to figure out what are the tasks and action items that need to be executed after that meeting. An account needs to be opened, for example, or money needs to be wired from here to there. We can actually execute certain tasks automatically. If we need to submit a form or something like that, we can automate that. That’s what we call an end-to-end process, from holding the meeting to ingesting the information to extracting the tasks to full execution.
Another area is around marketing-material generation, presentations, one-pagers, and so on. And another is lead generation, drafting responses to prospective leads, plus augmenting the leads’ information with things that we’re able to find on the internet. Two new experimental areas for us are a financial-planning agent that can do what we call document instrumentation. Often, documents need to be passed from vendor A to vendor B, and we’re working on how to automate and have an agent do that. We develop these AI applications and make them available to our own advisors on our platform.
Daniel Burke, founding partner, investment management, Callan Family Office: We serve ultrahigh-net-worth clients, and one of the overarching themes in serving them is complexity and customization. One of the biggest challenges we have in providing advice to these clients is managing a lot of the data—alternative-investment data, for example—that historically sat in Excel spreadsheets or PDF documents. That was our first use case for deploying AI within the Callan Family Office.
We use a third-party vendor, Canoe, to extract data elements from PDF documents. We are set up for AI to receive all of the quarterly capital statements, all of the capital call notices, all of the distribution notices. The AI will extract the necessary information and then trigger valuation updates for reporting purposes, but also will trigger workflows. That might be, for example, a capital call that needs to be done. Once we receive that document, we can then notify the teams internally that need to act upon that capital call notice to make sure funds are available, etc.
We’re deploying AI today to make our teams more efficient. AI is not making decisions. AI is not providing advice to our teams. It is taking on some of those more menial, manual tasks that it can do faster and more cheaply, and then tee up our teams for reconciliation and workflows, which prepare our advisors to give really good advice.
Jonathan Shenkman, president, chief investment officer, ParkBridge Wealth Management: I rely on Zoom so much for client meetings and prospect meetings, and there’s this tool called AI Companion, where you just click on it as the meeting’s getting started and it transcribes the entire meeting. This is huge for me because instead of having to remember everything or take notes as the client’s talking—and therefore not fully engaging with them, or maybe missing a point that they made—the entire meeting is transcribed and summarized. And it does so pretty well. Before you send a recap to a client you do have to do a read-through for minor mistakes or extraneous conversation. But for the most part it’s phenomenal. It also has a quick recap that is very helpful for compliance reasons. Nowadays you need to take notes on everything for compliance, so that aspect is very helpful. All of this is a huge time saver. It keeps me organized. And it help me to not miss certain points the client is making.
On the marketing side, I do a lot of webinars for accountants and lawyers and clients. For a long time I had thought about transcribing the webinar and putting it on my website for people who missed it or just prefer to read. For a period of time I hired a company to clean up the Zoom transcript. Now I use Claude, which cleans it up so that it’s readable. It’s been extremely helpful.
Write to advisor.editors@barrons.com
Meet
Ritik Malhotra
Ritik is Founder & CEO at Savvy Wealth. When trying to find a financial advisor that offered a tech-forward, modern experience after selling two startups in his 20s, Ritik was compelled to found Savvy when he was unable to find what he was looking for. Since then, Ritik has built an AI-driven technology platform and $700M+ AUM firm that not only simplifies advisors' day to day, but also reduces friction in client engagement.
Here’s How Financial Advisors Are Using AI in Their Businesses Right Now
Artificial intelligence has gone from a novelty to a practical tool at wealth management firms. Here’s how it’s being used.
Artificial intelligence has moved quickly from a novelty to a practical business tool. Retailers use it to generate personalized product recommendations. Manufacturers rely on it for predictive equipment maintenance. And healthcare companies use AI to make more accurate diagnoses. How is artificial intelligence being put to work in the wealth management field? For this week’s Barron’s Advisor Big Q, we put the question to three leaders in the field as well as a consultant.
John O’Connell, founder and CEO, The Oasis Group consultancy: The No. 1 AI application for most RIAs—not counting the really big ones with $25 billion and up—is note taking. A lot of firms have looked at AI and said, “I can use this to reduce the amount of time advisors spend taking notes during client calls and then summarizing them afterward.” Many advisors would say that if they spent one hour in a client meeting for an annual review, they would take notes for that one hour, and then they would usually spend between two and three hours documenting those notes, cleaning them up, putting them into their CRM and then sending action items to their team. So the note takers allowed advisors to reduce two to three hours’ worth of work to maybe half an hour’s worth of work.
The second big use case among RIAs is client communications. What we’re finding is that a lot of advisors use either ChatGPT or Claude, or in some cases Perplexity, to write to clients. A lot of advisors will tell you, “If I’ve got to write a direct email to a client, but I don’t want to sound like a jerk, I’m going to write that email, then run it through Claude or ChatGPT and say, ‘make this nicer,’ or ‘elevate the tone of the email.’”
Ritik Malhotra, founder and CEO, Savvy Wealth: Everyone is doing the meeting notes and summary stuff. We are able to take that and extract tasks and action items from it, and actually automate some of the execution. One part of our foundational incorporation of AI was taking meeting notes on the call if the client agrees—a transcription that then becomes a summary. From there we went deeper. With all the client data in one place, we’re able to figure out what are the tasks and action items that need to be executed after that meeting. An account needs to be opened, for example, or money needs to be wired from here to there. We can actually execute certain tasks automatically. If we need to submit a form or something like that, we can automate that. That’s what we call an end-to-end process, from holding the meeting to ingesting the information to extracting the tasks to full execution.
Another area is around marketing-material generation, presentations, one-pagers, and so on. And another is lead generation, drafting responses to prospective leads, plus augmenting the leads’ information with things that we’re able to find on the internet. Two new experimental areas for us are a financial-planning agent that can do what we call document instrumentation. Often, documents need to be passed from vendor A to vendor B, and we’re working on how to automate and have an agent do that. We develop these AI applications and make them available to our own advisors on our platform.
Daniel Burke, founding partner, investment management, Callan Family Office: We serve ultrahigh-net-worth clients, and one of the overarching themes in serving them is complexity and customization. One of the biggest challenges we have in providing advice to these clients is managing a lot of the data—alternative-investment data, for example—that historically sat in Excel spreadsheets or PDF documents. That was our first use case for deploying AI within the Callan Family Office.
We use a third-party vendor, Canoe, to extract data elements from PDF documents. We are set up for AI to receive all of the quarterly capital statements, all of the capital call notices, all of the distribution notices. The AI will extract the necessary information and then trigger valuation updates for reporting purposes, but also will trigger workflows. That might be, for example, a capital call that needs to be done. Once we receive that document, we can then notify the teams internally that need to act upon that capital call notice to make sure funds are available, etc.
We’re deploying AI today to make our teams more efficient. AI is not making decisions. AI is not providing advice to our teams. It is taking on some of those more menial, manual tasks that it can do faster and more cheaply, and then tee up our teams for reconciliation and workflows, which prepare our advisors to give really good advice.
Jonathan Shenkman, president, chief investment officer, ParkBridge Wealth Management: I rely on Zoom so much for client meetings and prospect meetings, and there’s this tool called AI Companion, where you just click on it as the meeting’s getting started and it transcribes the entire meeting. This is huge for me because instead of having to remember everything or take notes as the client’s talking—and therefore not fully engaging with them, or maybe missing a point that they made—the entire meeting is transcribed and summarized. And it does so pretty well. Before you send a recap to a client you do have to do a read-through for minor mistakes or extraneous conversation. But for the most part it’s phenomenal. It also has a quick recap that is very helpful for compliance reasons. Nowadays you need to take notes on everything for compliance, so that aspect is very helpful. All of this is a huge time saver. It keeps me organized. And it help me to not miss certain points the client is making.
On the marketing side, I do a lot of webinars for accountants and lawyers and clients. For a long time I had thought about transcribing the webinar and putting it on my website for people who missed it or just prefer to read. For a period of time I hired a company to clean up the Zoom transcript. Now I use Claude, which cleans it up so that it’s readable. It’s been extremely helpful.
Write to advisor.editors@barrons.com
Meet
Ritik Malhotra
Ritik is Founder & CEO at Savvy Wealth. When trying to find a financial advisor that offered a tech-forward, modern experience after selling two startups in his 20s, Ritik was compelled to found Savvy when he was unable to find what he was looking for. Since then, Ritik has built an AI-driven technology platform and $700M+ AUM firm that not only simplifies advisors' day to day, but also reduces friction in client engagement.
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