According to a study, wealth managers can ghost their normal clients and automate the services they currently rely on. A report from Bloomberg.
The article cites the obvious jargon used by Debasish Patnaik, a partner at consulting firm McKinsey & Company: “mass affluent,” referring to wealth management clients with $1 million or less in liquid assets. If you’re massively wealthy, I hate to spread the word that your wealth manager probably never cares about you and doesn’t manually compile reports on how your portfolio is doing.
“The mass affluent customer is now getting something close to private banking quality from AI,” Patnaik told Bloomberg. According to Patnaik, this changes the landscape when it comes to what financial institutions need from potential wealth managers.
Meanwhile, according to Patnaik, as Bloomberg puts it, the “truly wealthy” will get increasingly personalized services as wealth management becomes more automated and into ultra-premium versions. The new services the business will require will sound like a mix between a wealth manager and a bunch of consigliere and a parent. Firms will need employees with skills such as the ability to manage succession events, understand “family dynamics,” decide “which family member inherits what” for the universe’s owners, and have the warmth to “take it in” when the market turns negative.
Since AI can’t do any of these things, Patnaik says, firms are “going to take this seriously.”
But your experience as part of a nasty mass-wealthy heist may soon not include any actual wealth managers. Patnaik says Bloomberg firms will need to hire for roles overseeing automation and AI software: “experts, behavioral data scientists, personalization architects and human oversight specialists.”
Bloomberg’s story shows that Citi is at the forefront of this change. Joe Bonanno, Citi’s head of Wealth Intelligence, told Bloomberg that his company offers “artificial intelligence-powered software” such as a chatbot that tells clients how to manage their children’s college funds, and a push-button system that can “compose a chief investment officer’s email and explain what it means to the client.”
With all this AI, Citi probably thinks customer engagement will increase. “Engagement keeps customers happier and stickier,” Bonanno tells Bloomberg. Personally, I love being happy and clingy.
But none of this can matter according to Elon Musk, who came up with everyone’s favorite infinite money cheat code, said in an interview in January that everything we all know about saving money is about to change thanks to artificial intelligence. “We’re at the top of a roller coaster and it’s about to go down,” Musk said on the Moonshots with Peter Diamandis podcast, not entirely clear whether that’s good or bad. “Don’t worry about spending for retirement in 10 or 20 years. It doesn’t matter,” Diamandise said.
whatever that means, cool Most of us don’t save successfully for retirement anyway. I can’t wait to see what the near future holds for rich and poor.
