As artificial intelligence continues to reshape industries – with some high-profile reports showing a human toll from layoffs – at least one firm is taking a measured approach to integrating these technologies into its operations.
Siebert Financial, a full-service broker-dealer and RIA firm which manages $18 billion in assets, has focused its AI efforts on compliance review, client communications, and marketing – areas where efficiency gains are tangible but regulatory scrutiny remains high.
Over the past year, the firm says it has achieved a fifteenfold increase in client communications and content output, all of which passes through AI-assisted compliance systems. The company also claims a 40% to 70% reduction in marketing and communications production costs, thanks to AI tools that generate and pre-screen updates and newsletters. For investors under 35, it says engagement with newsletters has risen fivefold, a result Siebert credits to AI-curated content tailored to younger demographics.
Siebert’s leadership is quick to clarify that it's not replacing human staff with AI. Instead, the technology is positioned as an augmentation tool for compliance and marketing teams, enabling faster and more efficient work while sticking to guidance from the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority.
“We always make sure that the compliance officer checks it, but at least we can go there with an iteration that is, instead of 65%, 85% ready,” Stefano Marrone, chief marketing officer at Siebert.
In an interview with InvestmentNews, Marrone and Monte Traficante, Siebert's chief product officer, described how the firm relies on AI to handle the heavy lifting of initial content creation and compliance flagging.
"You can utilize AI to speed up a certain amount of content production for social media that you probably couldn't have done in the past, but there is also the fact that we can create way more variety to A-B test our marketing campaigns."
According to Marrone, Siebert has over 180,000 accounts spanning a variety of ages and different psychometric profiles, and it's been able to segment its communications better using the new AI capabilities. Creating reports and communications with investor relations has also improved substantially, he said, because all the relevant information is stored in a central repository.
"We can leverage AI to make sure that we're utilizing the right forms, qualifications, and the right disclaimers for the right type of financial products," Marrone said.
While the largest RIA firms may be able to afford to build their own AI in-house, Traficante said Siebert is leveraging many best-in-breed providers across multiple layers of its tech stack. Apart from using Copilot for databases, scripting, and coding, it uses UiPath and AIPath in its workflows and automation for front-end and middleware tech development. Within operations, Traficante said AI workflow agents – which could very well be the next big thing after AI notetakers – are there to do simple tasks and substantially automate certain processes.
Beyond production, Marrone said Siebert has fed FINRA and SEC guidelines into a custom large language model, which is then used to pre-screen content for compliance.
While that robot has improved substantially since being launched roughly a year ago, flagging issues that some human staff might have overlooked, Traficante says human involvement remains essential in cases that may involve judgment calls.
“AI does a good job analyzing, interpreting alongside me and our team to know, is what we’re saying along the lines of a solicitation of a particular product or business line, or is it more of we’re just discussing our services?” Traficante said, emphasizing that the compliance team, not the AI, has the last say. “A lot of times, it’s very nuanced, especially with FINRA and SEC rules and regulations. It’s not black and white.”
That hybrid approach aligns with a recent compliance resource from the North American Securities Administrators Association. Among other areas, the NASAA recommendations stressed "all AI-driven output such as marketing materials, client communications, and investment recommendations should be reviewed by a compliance officer for accuracy before being disseminated."
Despite the increased reliance on automation, Siebert has not reduced its workforce. From Marrone's perspective, having AI in the picture has allowed the production team to focus on their strengths and engage in higher-level activities.
“It's very rare that you find a super creative person that has a regulatory attitude ... With this, the creatives can focus on the tone of voice, and the regulated aspect and research is now taken care of by and large with AI with a final review,” he said. "Our plan is to soon launch a very specific product connected to video content ... produced by AI, checked by compliance, but immediately available."
Looking around and ahead, Traficante believes RIAs are most likely going to adopt AI, leveraging it for portfolio management and rebalancing in response to trends in the markets. And while he sees broker-dealer firms also leveraging AI, he argues it will mostly on the front-end, client-facing side.
"A lot of the brokerage industry is based on legacy systems, very similar to the FAA," he said. "It's going to take a long time for the financial industry in general until those systems become unantiquated, where you're going to see AI speeding up a lot of the financial systems."
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