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In wealth management, we’re experiencing an AI gold rush of sorts. New tools are popping up that promise solutions galore.
That means they're often paying for products that aren’t increasing firm or client value, improving day-to-day workload, or driving positive results. Yet those are exactly the outcomes your firm and clients need.
How do you select the right AI vendor for your wealth management firm?
Finding the right vendor requires more than choosing a set of bells and whistles. The best AI solutions for your firm will provide the right features for your team’s workflow and strategic alignment with your regulatory, security, and compliance needs.
The right AI solutions for your firm will also integrate well with your existing tech stack and enable advisors to stay in the loop. These factors bolster comprehensive efficiency and long-term scalability, rather than adding yet another complication to your operations.
The cost of choosing a poor fit is high. So is the cost of correcting that mistake.
Choosing the right AI vendor from the start helps your firm minimize the risk of SEC fines resulting from poor fits. It helps you control security risks and ensure confidentiality. It protects you from the cost of implementing and integrating yet another tool to clean up the mess.
The benefit of choosing the right fit may require up-front investment, but it pays back many times over—because the right fit is not a one-size-fits-all. The right solution for your firm understands both the wealth management industry and your firm’s specific needs and goals.
How do you identify the right features in an AI wealth management solution?
- Start by IDing the firm’s pain points.
Your firm needs the right tools for the job. To a hammer, everything is a nail—and just because a solution is AI-driven doesn’t mean it’s providing the most bang for your buck.
Places to start evaluating for the right high-impact AI solutions in a wealth management firm include:
- What manual tasks take up the most bandwidth for financial advisors?
- Where do clients experience the greatest delays?
- What information does your firm regularly undercapture?
- What regulatory and compliance tasks require the most time and attention?
- Where are the opportunities for growth that the firm hasn’t yet capitalized on?
- Evaluate the value of the solution’s output fBut not all AI tools in our space are created equal. Too often, wealth management firms purchase one-off solutions that don’t actually support the overall business firm.
Measure an AI vendor’s capabilities not against their own self-provided claims, but against the high-impact pain points you’ve identified.
It’s not enough for an AI solution to address each of those pain points. How the vendor addresses them matters.
For instance, two AI solutions might transcribe client conversations. If your goal is to produce faster follow-ups to clients and capture action items for review, you want capabilities that can intelligently organize conversation notes in those ways.
Partnering with an AI vendor requires due diligence, including research and a trial. Make sure that the solutions provide the precise value you need.
How do you choose an AI vendor for strategic alignment with your firm?
In wealth management, you don’t just do the job. You need to do the job with accuracy. You’re ultimately responsible for the output that your AI vendor enables.
So, evaluating your prospective AI vendors for strategic alignment not only improves the firm’s productivity but also protects its credibility.
The following are criteria for evaluating an AI vendor’s strategic alignment with your wealth management firm.
- Standards-based criteria:
- Security and compliance. How each AI vendor understands and works with the requirements for GDPR, SOC2, and other regulatory frameworks applicable to your specific operations will impact the degree of trust you and your clients have in the AI solution.
- Transparency. Wealth management requires intense transparency with clients and with regulatory bodies. Test how well each AI vendor documents activities and captures data according to industry-specific standards.
- Human controls. Accountability and compliance still rest with advisors and the firms they represent. Not one of our clients has opted to reduce human oversight in an AI-driven workflow. The ability to keep advisors in the loop ensures the personal touch clients expect, and provides added accountability where it matters most.
- Technological criteria:
- Interoperability. Your existing tech stack represents a serious investment. Evaluate how an AI solution integrates with, supports, eases, or replaces your existing workflow. Furthermore, will it require even more investment?
- Scalability. As your firm grows, how will each AI vendor support that process—and how will it scale with you?
- Adaptability. The long-term vision of the right AI vendor must align with your firm’s. How well the vendor can pivot and adapt to changes in the regulatory landscape (and in your business operations) dictates how you’ll continue to benefit from the solution. To use the dreaded job interview question: “Where do you both see yourselves in five years?” matters to this partnership.
- Speed of innovation. Wealth management may be a relatively slow-changing industry, but AI is changing that like no other advancement since the internet. Today’s AI solutions will be dinosaurs in a year. Evaluate how each AI vendor has adapted so far, and what their plans for continuous growth in a rapidly changing world look like.
- Partnership criteria:
- Support & onboarding. Ask how each AI vendor handles both initial and ongoing integration with your operations. Some vendors provide materials for self-guided operation. Others work with you to integrate the AI solution into your existing workflow, onboard the team, and provide continued support. What does your team require both now and in the future?
- Build vs. buy. This criterion is particularly relevant for larger firms. The right solutions for your firm may already exist. You may also benefit from the higher investment of building bespoke solutions. Different AI vendors have different capabilities for customizing solutions for your needs.
Due diligence now leads to long-term results.
Yes, speed matters. It’s essential for leading wealth management firms to integrate high-powered agentic AI solutions or risk being left behind.
But choosing the right AI vendor for your firm now will save untold time and expenses down the line. It will also provide the most value for your clients, your business, and your bottom line.
Ready to see how Zeplyn’s agentic AI-powered solutions can support your firm? Book a demo now.
