Are AI Financial Advisors The Future?

Artificial intelligence (AI) has been used in the financial industry for many years, but with the introduction of ChatGPT, a chatbot that can generate human-like conversations, and other modern tools, it feels like there’s an enormous opportunity for AI to replace (or at least augment) traditional financial advisors. Imagine a world where we all have AI-powered virtual assistants that can give us smart investment advice and answer financial planning questions using natural language prompts. Are we headed there? According to some estimates, the AI market size is projected to reach $733.7 billion by 2027, and a large portion of that will come from the financial sector.

In this article, we will explore how AI is transforming the financial industry, especially in the areas of wealth management and personal finance advisory. We will look at the current state of AI financial services, such as robo-advisors, which are digital platforms that provide automated investment management with minimal human intervention, and how they are evolving with generative AI tools like ChatGPT. We will also discuss the potential benefits and challenges of using AI for financial decision making, and what role humans will play in this new era of fintech.

Finally, we will introduce you to Kubera, a simple and powerful tool that helps you track and manage your wealth across all your assets and investments.

Robo-Advisors for Wealth Management and the State of AI Financial Services

Robo-advisors are one of the most popular applications of AI in the financial industry. They are online platforms that use algorithms to provide automated investment services to customers. They typically offer low-cost, diversified, and personalized portfolios based on the customer’s risk profile, financial goals, and preferences. Some of the benefits of using robo-advisors are:

They can save you time and money by eliminating the need for human advisors, who may charge high fees or commissions. According to a report, the average annual fee for robo-advisors is 0.23%, compared to 1.02% for traditional advisors.
They can provide consistent and unbiased advice based on data and logic, rather than emotions or biases. A study by Vanguard found that robo-advisors can reduce behavioral errors by up to 1.5% per year.
They can monitor and adjust your portfolio automatically according to market conditions and your changing needs. For example, robo-advisors can perform tax-loss harvesting, which is a strategy that involves selling securities at a loss to offset capital gains taxes.
They can offer additional features such as automatic rebalancing, which ensures that your portfolio stays aligned with your target asset allocation, or social responsibility investing, which allows you to invest in companies that align with your values and ethics.

The global robo-advisory market is expected to grow rapidly in the coming years, reaching $16 trillion in assets under management by 2025, up from $2 trillion in 2019. Some of the leading robo-advisor platforms include Betterment, Wealthfront, Schwab Intelligent Portfolios, Vanguard Personal Advisor Services, and Ellevest.

However, despite their popularity and convenience, robo-advisors are not perfect. They have some limitations that may prevent them from fully satisfying the needs and expectations of customers. Some of these limitations are:

They follow human-created investment strategies that may not be optimal or adaptable to complex or dynamic situations. For instance, robo-advisors may not be able to account for black swan events, which are unpredictable and extreme events that have a significant impact on the markets.
They are trained to simply execute against the set rules rather than engage directly in wealth management conversations or answer abstract and strategic questions. For example, robo-advisors may not be able to explain why they recommend certain investments or how they handle risk management.
They may not be able to handle complex scenarios such as estate planning, retirement planning, tax optimization, or inheritance issues. These scenarios require human expertise and judgment, as well as an understanding of the customer’s personal and emotional situation.
They may not be able to provide emotional support or guidance to customers who may face financial stress or uncertainty. Research has shown that human advisors can play a vital role in building trust and confidence with customers, especially during times of market volatility or crisis.

These limitations open the door to the next era of AI financial advisors, which aim to overcome these challenges by using more advanced and sophisticated AI technologies.

These technologies include generative AI, which refers to AI models capable of generating unique, high-quality content, such as text or images. Generative AI can potentially enhance the capabilities of robo-advisors by:

Creating more flexible and adaptive investment strategies that can respond to changing market conditions and customer preferences.
Generating natural language responses that can explain the rationale behind investment decisions and answer complex financial questions.
Providing personalized and holistic financial planning that can address various aspects of the customer’s financial situation and goals.
Offering emotional intelligence and empathy that can establish rapport and trust with customers and provide them with reassurance and support.

Some examples of generative AI tools that are being developed or used in the financial industry include ChatGPT, a chatbot that can generate human-like conversations; Einstein Relationship Insights, a tool that can discover hidden connections to prospects through digital automation; and Bloomberg GPT, a powerful, finance-focused AI model that can help financial professionals with various NLP tasks.

Generative AI is still in its early stages of development and adoption, but it has the potential to revolutionize the financial industry and create new opportunities for both customers and advisors. By combining the efficiency and scalability of robo-advisors with the creativity and intelligence of generative AI, we may witness the emergence of a new generation of AI financial advisors that can offer the best of both worlds.

The ChatGPT Era of AI Financial Services

ChatGPT is a powerful language model developed by OpenAI that can generate coherent and natural text on any topic given a prompt. It can also answer questions, summarize texts, write essays, create stories, and more. ChatGPT is based on a deep neural network that has been trained on a large corpus of text from the internet, such as Wikipedia articles, news stories, books, blogs, social media posts, etc. It can learn from any text data and generate new text based on its knowledge and context.

ChatGPT has many potential applications in various domains, including finance. In fact, 81% of financial services professionals worldwide saw AI as an essential factor for their company’s future in 2020, and 75% of financial services executives expect to increase their AI-related investments by at least 10% in the next fiscal year. One of the main areas where ChatGPT in financial services can make a difference is in providing personalized and interactive financial advice to customers using natural language.

For example, ChatGPT can be used to create chatbots that can communicate with customers via text or voice messages. These chatbots can understand the customer’s financial situation, goals, preferences, and questions, and provide relevant and customized advice based on their data and logic. They can also explain their reasoning and recommendations in simple terms, and answer any follow-up questions or concerns that the customer may have. They can also learn from the customer’s feedback and behavior, and improve their service over time.

Some of the benefits of using ChatGPT for financial advisory are:

They can provide more personalized and tailored advice than robo-advisors, which may use generic or predefined strategies.
They can handle more complex and diverse scenarios than robo-advisors, which may not be able to deal with specific or unique situations.
They can provide more engaging and interactive service than robo-advisors, which may not be able to communicate effectively or empathetically with customers.
They can provide more accessible and convenient service than human advisors, who may not be available or affordable for everyone.

Some of the possible use cases of ChatGPT for financial advisory are:

AI in Stock Market Trades and Predictions

ChatGPT can be used to forecast stock market trends and make trades automatically based on AI analysis. For example, ChatGPT can:

Analyze historical and current data from various sources, such as financial reports, news articles, social media posts, etc., and identify patterns, correlations, and anomalies.
Generate predictions and recommendations for buying, selling, or holding stocks based on the data analysis and the customer’s risk tolerance and goals.
Recognize sentiment in text using natural language AI for investment research and chat data analysis.
Execute trades automatically or with the customer’s confirmation using an online brokerage account.
Provide explanations and justifications for the trades and predictions, and answer any questions or doubts that the customer may have.

AI in Wealth Management Strategies

ChatGPT can be used to create data-driven strategies and risk assessment for wealth management. For example, ChatGPT can:

Collect and analyze information from the customer, such as their income, expenses, assets, liabilities, goals, preferences, etc., and create a comprehensive financial profile.
Generate a personalized and optimal investment portfolio based on the customer’s profile and market conditions, and allocate funds accordingly.
Offer personalized recommendations for financial products based on customer data, risk preferences, and goals.
Manage the portfolio over time by making adjustments based on the customer’s changing needs and market fluctuations.
Provide regular reports and feedback on the portfolio performance and progress towards the customer’s goals.
Use insights from various data sources to predict future outcomes with high accuracy.

24/7 Virtual Assistance for Personal Finance Advisory

ChatGPT can be used to provide round-the-clock (24/7) financial advice to customers on various topics and issues. For example, ChatGPT can:

Answer common or specific questions that customers may have about personal finance, such as budgeting, saving, investing, debt management, taxes, retirement planning, etc.
Analyze and understand each customer’s financial situation more quickly (and more effectively) than human financial advisors, and provide relevant and actionable suggestions.
Enhance client relationships with 1:1 service at all hours, on any subject, and with minimal wait or hold times.
Improve client service by converting speech to text and gain insights from interactions like prior check-in calls.
Extract and analyze data from images and documents provided by clients for processes like retirement account servicing and investment opportunity discovery.
Make financial advisory content and services multilingual with dynamic machine translation to cater to a broader audience of potential clients.

The Coming Explosion of the AI-Powered Fintech Market

The AI-powered fintech market is poised to explode in the near future, as more and more companies and customers adopt and embrace AI technologies for their financial needs. According to a report by Grand View Research, the global AI in fintech market size was valued at $9.45 billion in 2021, and is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 16.5% from 2022 to 2030.

Some of the factors that are driving this growth are:

The increasing demand for personalized and convenient financial services from customers, especially millennials and Gen Zs who are tech-savvy and expect digital solutions.
The rising competition among financial institutions to offer innovative and differentiated products and services to attract and retain customers.
The growing availability of data sources and computational power that enable AI models to learn from large amounts of information and generate insights faster and better than humans.
The improving regulatory environment that supports the development and adoption of AI technologies in the financial sector.

Some of the challenges that may hinder this growth are:

The lack of trust and transparency among customers who may not understand how AI works or how it makes decisions that affect their finances.
The ethical and social implications of using AI for financial decision making, such as privacy, security, bias, accountability, etc.
The technical and operational difficulties of integrating AI systems with existing legacy systems and processes in the financial industry.
The shortage of skilled talent who can develop, deploy, maintain, and improve AI solutions for fintech.

What Will Humans Do?

With all these advancements in AI technologies for finance, you may wonder what will happen to human financial advisors. Are they doomed? Will they be replaced by machines? Will they become obsolete?

The answer is probably not. While AI can offer many benefits and advantages over humans in some aspects of financial advisory, it is not perfect. It is still subject to errors, “hallucinations”, user error, or malicious attacks. It may also lack some human qualities that are essential for effective financial advisory, such as intuition, creativity, empathy, or ethics.

Therefore, we are likely still a long way off from just letting AI do everything on its own when it comes to financial advisory. It is important to keep a pulse on your financial situation and understand your assets and investment strategy. Otherwise, you may struggle to understand the direction, advice, or action that the AI is taking, or you may miss some opportunities or risks that the AI may not be aware of or consider.

This is where humans can still play a vital role in the AI-powered fintech market.

Humans can:

Provide oversight and supervision to the AI systems, and intervene when necessary to correct errors, prevent fraud, or resolve disputes.
Provide complementary and value-added services to the AI systems, such as emotional support, ethical guidance, creative solutions, or strategic vision.
Provide feedback and improvement to the AI systems, such as data quality, model performance, user experience, or business outcomes.

In other words, humans can work with AI as partners, rather than competitors, to deliver better and more holistic financial services to customers. This may require some changes in the skills, roles, and mindset of human financial advisors, but it may also create new opportunities and possibilities for them.

Use Kubera to Get the 10,000-Foot View

As we see a blend of traditional and AI-driven services in the financial landscape, tools like Kubera emerge as essential complements. While AI may guide our specific investment decisions, platforms like Kubera allow users to monitor the broader impact across their entire portfolio.

Kubera gives you a single place to see and track your wealth. You can:

Connect all your accounts from different financial institutions, such as banks, brokerages, retirement plans, cryptocurrencies, etc., and see your net worth in real time.
Track all your assets, such as real estate, art, collectibles, vehicles, etc., and get their estimated values from various sources.
Get the big picture of your wealth quickly and easily with intuitive dashboards, charts, and reports.
Set up alerts and notifications for important events or changes in your wealth status.
Securely share your wealth information with your trusted contacts or beneficiaries in case of emergency or death.

While Kubera is not an AI financial advisor and doesn't make active investment recommendations, it serves as an invaluable dashboard for those using AI-driven financial tools. For instance, after receiving investment advice from an AI tool, users can turn to Kubera to visualize the impact of that advice on their overall portfolio. It provides a consolidated view, aggregating data from multiple sources, which can be crucial when using multiple AI-driven platforms.

Imagine receiving a stock recommendation from an AI tool. With Kubera, not only can you see the potential addition to your portfolio, but you can also track its performance over time, set alerts for significant changes, and even share this information with trusted contacts or beneficiaries. It's where the granular insights from AI tools meet the broad overview required for effective wealth management.

Kubera can be a great complement to any AI financial advisor you may use. You can use AI to guide specific decisions; use Kubera to measure the impact across your entire portfolio. You can use Kubera as a data source for your AI advisor; use your AI advisor as a feedback mechanism for Kubera. You can use Kubera to get the 10,000-foot view of your wealth; use your AI advisor to zoom in on the details.

If you are interested in trying out Kubera, you can sign up for a $1 trial today.

Conclusion

As the world of finance continues to evolve, the fusion of traditional methodologies with AI-driven insights stands out as the path forward. While robo-advisors and generative AI tools like ChatGPT offer unprecedented automation and precision, the human touch remains irreplaceable, especially in areas demanding emotional intelligence and holistic understanding.

Tools like Kubera bridge the gap, allowing users to leverage the best of both worlds.

The future of financial advisory isn't solely in the realm of AI; it's an intricate dance between cutting-edge technology and the timeless value of human intuition. As we stand on the precipice of this fusion, one must ponder: how will the next wave of innovation shape our financial decisions? Will we see a world where AI tools not only advise but also educate, and where platforms like Kubera become the norm rather than the exception? Only time will tell, but one thing is certain — the future of finance is a blend of the best of both worlds.