The biggest buzz on the first day of the Future Proof Festival in Huntington Beach was undoubtedly the launch of Claude for Financial Advisors, which saw AI heavyweight Anthropic join forces with a host of major wealth management players such as Dynasty Financial and Charles Schwab.
The technology, unveiled Monday, can connect Claude to custodians, portfolio platforms, CRMs, and planning tools.
Shirl Penney, founder and CEO of Dynasty Financial Partners, lavished praise on the technology during a well-attended panel discussion on Future Proof’s spectacular Ocean Stage. “I think it’s a big deal for a couple of reasons … how many of you, advisors in the audience, got into the industry because you wanted to spend 80%-plus of your work week on middle and back-office bullshit?” he said. “How many of you got into the business because you wanted to spend more time with your clients and you wanted to help more people?”
Penney also pointed to the wealth management heavyweights who are working with Anthropic on Claude for financial advisors. “You have so many of the biggest players in the industry – you have the largest custodian, with Schwab, you have the largest asset manager in the industry with Blackrock, and some of the other largest players, with iCapital,” he said. “This is, I think, a really important in time because we have more and more Americans in need of financial advice, the cost of service continues to go up.”
Other companies involved in the launch include Addepar, Envestnet, iCapital, SS&C Black Diamond, Wealthbox, Wealth.com, Vanguard and Zocks.
“Today is as big moment as I have seen in my career in the independent space given the level of alignment and enthusiasm,” added Penney.
“Anthropic is the responsible AI player,” said Peter Nolan, head of asset and wealth management at Anthropic, when asked during the panel about how Claude will work with the various systems. “We don’t train on data, it’s as simple as that,” he said, later in the panel discussion, addressing a broader concern about Anthropic's AI systems.
Advisors in the audience told InvestmentNews that they see Claude’s integration into the advisor tech stack as a positive. “I am sort of more in the camp that it’s something that will be able to tremendously help advisors, not replace them,” said Charlie Rocco, CEO of Moneco Advisors. “I think that the ability to, in natural language, query and update all the various systems that we have will be a game changer.”
Hugh Gallagher, CEO of Dublin, Ireland-based Peak Financial had crossed the Atlantic for Future Proof. “It’s really good, they have all these seamless integrations over here, there’s APIs where systems talk to other systems,” he said. “But the Irish system is still more fragmented.”
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