Wealth tech and TAMP firm AssetMark is bringing AI-generated portfolio commentary to its network of 11,000 financial advisors, serving as a foundational script to support conversations with clients.
The new feature, called Talk Tracks, runs individual analysis on each client portfolio under an advisor to identify key drivers of return and risk versus the portfolio’s benchmark and targets, and scans news sources for relevant market impacts. Talk Tracks is currently an opt-in feature for advisors, but AssetMark’s chief product and technology officer Alex Pape expects the AI tool to be embedded for all advisors by the fall.
“This solves the problem of an advisor preparing for a client conversation or getting an unexpected phone call at 10:00 a.m. on a Thursday asking them detailed questions about the portfolio,” Pape told InvestmentNews. “[Talk Tracks] is literally a series of talking points that could constitute a script for how the advisor could represent the portfolio to that client.”
According to Pape, AssetMark advisors traditionally spent between 20 to 60 minutes to assemble data sources needed to answer portfolio questions from clients on trades or positions, whereas Talk Tracks can immediately surface those details. In rolling out Talk Tracks, Pape says 70% of advisors who tried it returned to use it again.
“If the advisor uses our tax optimization service for the [client] account, which is really popular on taxable accounts, it will give them commentary on the tax alpha and the tax savings activity in the account,” Pape said of Talk Tracks.
AssetMark’s internal survey of 107 advisors found that 94% believe AI could reduce time spent preparing for client meetings, yet 65% are not using it in a consistent, embedded way. Pape, who led product for BlackRock’s wealthtech business before joining AssetMark last year, says that AssetMark’s AI advisory board was involved in Talk Tracks development over the last nine months of testing the product.
“We firmly believe that the average advisor is going to be managing way more clients and way more underlying portfolios over the next 10 years, both enabled by technology but also just by the trends in the number of advisors there are in the industry and the number of clients,” said Pape. “So I think tools like this are necessary, they're how an advisor will be able to actually do that going forward.”
Pape describes Talk Tracks as the “angel whispering in the advisor's ear,” with no plans to move the product towards being directly client-facing. Chicago-based private equity firm GTCR acquired AssetMark for $2.7 billion from Chinese company Huatai Securities in 2024. Today, AssetMark reports over $180 billion in platform assets and over 340,000 investor households.
“We have seen just in the last few months of using [Talk Tracks] that when there are red days in the market, traffic to this jumps, and the value of it jumps because there's a bunch of client conversations coming in, or the advisor wants to do a bunch of outbound conversations about their portfolios,” said Pape.
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