LPL, Orion add Anthropic's new AI for advisors

Artificial intelligence company Anthropic has announced new plug-ins specifically designed for wealth management and investment banking, partnering with LPL and Orion to deploy the AI across their advisor workflows. 

Anthropic powers Claude, a large language model that competes with the likes of OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini. Anthropic’s announced collaborations with leading broker-dealer LPL and wealthtech firm Orion follow a financial stock selloff two weeks ago, where shares of legacy firms LPL, Schwab and Raymond James tumbled after challenger custodian startup Altruist launched an AI tax-planning tool amid broader fears of AI disruption.

“These plugins give RIAs, broker dealers, custodians, TAMPs, and other platforms a foundation to build their own private plugins customized to their advisors, powered by their data, controlled by their compliance teams. They own what they build. We're providing the building blocks, while the experts build on top,” Peter Nolan, Anthropic’s head of asset and wealth management, said in his LinkedIn post announcing an expanding partnership with LPL.

"By expanding our relationship with Anthropic, we have a respected partner to deliver on our roadmap of industry-leading capabilities for financial advisors and institutions," LPL added in a social media announcement.  

The AI infrastructure will be available to over 30,000 advisors within LPL’s network. In an interview with InvestmentNews, Orion’s president of technology Reed Colley explained that Anthropic’s plug-ins will be integrated into Orion’s Denali AI platform to help advisors analyze investment allocations for clients and automate other workflows.

“They're going to be able to do faster meeting prep and client reviews, proposals, generations, plan reviews, even rebalancing. All of those things are going to be skills that are going to be available in our solution for our advisors,” said Colley. 

Nolan added in his LinkedIn post that Anthropic’s new Claude plug-ins will be available “not just for enterprise,” after one advisor commented, “the industry is dominated by thousands of smaller firms that desperately want these capabilities and security assurances, but can’t pay for the enterprise level seat.”

Orion and LPL’s embrace of Anthropic’s wealth management plug-ins comes as new research shows the flaws of AI-generated investment use cases. The startup DeepVest tested systems from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Anthropic’s Claude, SuperGrok, and Gemini—finding that “general-purpose AI tools failed 85% of tasks, producing incorrect calculations, hallucinated data, or no results at all,” when tasked with various investment management and portfolio analysis workflows. 

“We're already doing some of that today in line with regulations, to make sure that we're adhering to the advice and compliance guidelines that advisors have with their clients,” Colley said of Orion’s AI-powered investment tools to help make advisors “superhuman” in serving clients. 

“So being able to analyze a portfolio, analyze the goals of a client. What they care about, what's meaningful for them and their personal life—their values, passions, purpose—and really build out allocations and plans that help fit that mold is what we're doing today with our Denali platform” said Colley. “This is where we're gonna incorporate more of these skills as we're developing and Anthropic is developing into that platform to do more of that.'