AI widens tech divide between RIAs and banks

AI adaptation in financial services is being led by RIAs, according to a new report from wealth technology consultancy F2 Strategy. Of the survey’s 74% of wealth management respondents that currently use AI, about 80% are RIAs or hybrid RIAs.

RIAs (95%) are four times more likely to use AI than banks and trust companies. Of the 26% of firms that report not currently using AI, 90% are trust companies. “Bank trusts are not stepping into this, we’re concerned they might be falling behind on their competitive curve,” said F2 Strategy’s head of client engagement, Bryce Carter. 

Smaller RIAs were found to be more likely to access AI through vendor relationships, while larger institutions more often build their own in-house capabilities. Advisors have used AI for note taking and meeting preparation, alternatives data processing, delivering compliant messages to clients, while there are also AI-assisted platforms for estate and tax planning.  

“There are clear benefits of AI use in the industry to streamline operations and allow advisors more time to build stronger client relationships,” said Doug Fritz, F2 Strategy co-founder and executive chairman. “While RIAs have embraced the disruptive technology, we’re concerned that the bank trust sector will fall even further behind in its ability to compete for client relationships.”

The 2025 Q2 trend report was conducted in April 2025 with responses from 42 firms across the wealth management industry. Overall, F2 says the percentage of wealth management firms using AI has increased by 23% since 2023.

One large RIA that has actively integrated artificial intelligence is Wealthspire Advisors, which manages $30 billion in assets with roughly 400 employees and 130 advisors across its 25 offices. COO and president Eric Sontag told InvestmentNews that Wealthspire uses Microsoft Copilot for tasks such as transcribing meeting notes and reviewing documents. 

“For compliance, we were working on making an agent using Copilot where we could quickly identify and look through contracts to find any contracts that have this [specific] type of clause in it, we want to make sure we review,” said Sontag. 

Wealthspire has also established its own internal AI innovation group consisting of employees who discuss their AI usage and ideas across the firm.

“When we have a prospect that comes in, they usually have a ton of documents that historically has been quite a bit of manual work for our advisor associates,” added Sontag. “So we built an agent that everyone's using now where they could put the PDFs into that agent and say, please output a very simple table, here's the ticker, here's the number of shares from these six different PDFs that come from six different brokerage firms or custodians in different formats that I can now upload into the proposal software. We’ve seen a lot of success there.”