Fintechs finding new ways to bring AI to advisors

The artificial intelligence boom is on in advisor technology.

Investments in AI technology soared to $93.5 billion in 2021, a 633% increase from $12.75 billion in 2015, according to an analysis of funding data from more than 10,000 AI companies by writebuddy.ai, an automated content generation tool. OpenAI, the creator of the popular ChatGPT text generation software, leads the way with $11 billion.

Advisor fintechs are quickly finding ways to integrate this technology into their own tools. The latest comes from FMG Suite, a cloud-based marketing software for financial advisors, which announced a new engine that automatically generates personalized social media content. The new product combines the content curation software Vestorly, which FMG acquired in July, and ChatGPT.

The AI works within FMG’s Curator product to produce custom, compliant captions for social media posts based on FMG’s best practices.   

"We've always envisioned a world where advisors can leverage our content library as a starting point and, with the click of a button, customize it to be authentically and uniquely theirs," Dave Christensen, FMG’s chief product officer, said in a statement. “GPT-3.5 is a disruptor unlike anything we've seen before in marketing technology and will likely displace and shift the strategies of many firms in our space.”

FMG has been working with GPT since the Vestorly acquisition, testing to find the right combination of well-written content, proprietary prompts for the AI, compliance screening and human quality assurance. The tool is currently in a beta-testing phase and will be rolled out to all customers later this month.

While the tool is currently limited to social media posts, FMG plans to expand the functionality to include emails, blog posts, video scripts, newsletters and website landing pages. The company also plans to add increased options to personalize the AI for preferences related to tone, length and formatting, as well as a feature that will alert advisors if content is flagged by compliance departments.

The announcement comes a week after Orion Advisor Services revealed plans to use ChatGPT to generated automated responses in Redtail Speak, its client text-messaging service. Morgan Stanley is also working on its own application of the technology for its wealth management business, according to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. And on Tuesday, Salesforce announced a new partnership with OpenAI to upgrade the Einstein program within its customer relationship management platform.

[More: AI for wealth management: Advisors must evolve to survive in the AI era]

Another new technology, MarketReader, uses proprietary models to give real-time explanations on why markets are moving. The company feeds its data to ChatGPT, which generates a single-paragraph summary about why a certain asset or fund is moving as it is.

The company hopes this approach can make MarketReader more useful for financial advisors than more expensive tools like the Bloomberg terminal.

“At the end of the day, [financial advisors] might get in front of their screens to catch up on what's been happening, or even at the end of week, and don’t need to know every single wiggle in the market,” said Jens Nordvig, co-founder and CEO of MarketReader. “We can summarize all of the high-frequency things exactly into the frequency that they want.”

While the publicly available ChatGPT has been criticized for inaccuracies in some prompts, MarketReader says it can overcome this by feeding the algorithm specific, curated and high-quality data.

“If you tell ChatGPT to work with a data set that is full of garbage, it's going to give you summaries that are full of garbarge,” Nordvig said.

Prior to launching MarketReader, Nordvig spent more than 20 years advising institutional investors, with a resume that includes Goldman Sachs, Bridgewater Associates and Japanese brokerage firm Nomura Securities. He’s spent the last two years researching and developing its model to create automated summaries that would be satisfactory to world’s most sophisticated investors, he said.

“Financial advisors are at the top of the list of who we think could benefit,” Nordviq said, adding that the company will allow individual advisors to subscribe to the service and get alerts on stocks or funds on a watch list. MarketReader also aims to partner with larger wealth management firms and integrate into their brokerage platforms to replace the static news that companies feature on quote pages.   

MarketReader has received some backing from financial advisors and plans to launch a closed beta-testing period in April before a wider rollout later in 2023.

[More: What buzzy fintech innovations can advisors expect this year?]