Picture this: You’re knee-deep in client paperwork, trying to analyze a couple’s financial goals while simultaneously drafting notes for their upcoming meeting. At the same time, your phone buzzes with urgent emails from other clients. The pressure is on, and you’re feeling overwhelmed. This scenario is all too familiar for financial professionals. The good news? You don’t have to go it alone. AI tools for financial advisors can take over the time-consuming tasks that bog you down, so you can focus on what matters to your clients. In this article, we’ll explore how AI for financial advisors can streamline your advisory workflow, deliver more brilliant client insights, and grow your financial practice more efficiently.
One tool that can help you achieve these objectives is Horizon’s AI desktop assistant. This innovative tool helps financial professionals work smarter, not harder, to reduce stress and enhance the client experience.
How Can AI Help Financial Advisors?
The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) is changing how most industries operate daily. And the financial sector is no exception. According to NVIDIA, a leader in AI, 91% of financial services companies are already using AI or are assessing it for use.
The tool has become an essential part of technology and workflows within:
- Banking
- Insurance
- Financial services
Changing how products and services are offered. For financial advisors, AI provides deep learning and prediction to improve decision-making and streamline operations. Let’s explore how AI can help financial advisors grow and elevate their businesses.
Identify Trends and Patterns
Predictive analysis uses historical data, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and statistical models to forecast future outcomes. Through this process, AI can find patterns and trends that humans may not be able to see.
For example, it could identify correlations between securities and market indicators that you could then share with your clients, giving them a leg up in strategy. AI can also monitor keywords on an ongoing basis to spot trending topics online. This means that advisors can provide more informed and up-to-date investment advice.
Data Analysis
AI models can process information exponentially faster than humans and with a precise level of accuracy. By analyzing enormous volumes of data in real-time, including data on customer behaviors, earnings transcripts, and trading patterns, AI gives financial advisors valuable insights that can propel customer-specific portfolio strategy and planning.
In 2023, Morgan Stanley officially rolled out its internal tool that allows financial advisors to retrieve research and documents. It is a resource that advisors can use to dive deeper into proprietary research to address the questions financial advisors have.
Note: Sentiment analysis is another type of valuable data analysis. AI and large language models (LLMs) can scan texts such as chats and social media to identify sentiment or prevailing emotional opinion.
Client Service
AI can help financial firms manage client relationships and provide on-demand, 24-hour service. For example, chatbots on websites, social media, or messaging platforms can answer frequently asked questions and handle routine tasks like appointment scheduling or arranging automatic payments.
As early as 2017, Capital One was using a text-based AI customer assistant called Eno. Eno analyzes data to generate insights and anticipate customer needs, proactively providing client services like fraud alerts and recommendations to manage spending.
Compliance
In a highly regulated industry, financial advisors should be cautious with large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT. They need to double-check all advice and answers from the platform for accuracy and avoid feeding private or proprietary information to the LLM.
AI can also make it easier for financial advisors to ensure compliance. AI acts as a security system against regulatory violations by monitoring activities, transactions, and communications 24/7, and then flagging any potential issues. With most cases in which AI is used, though, a human should review each of the possible problems for accuracy.
Portfolio Optimization
Automated investment platforms like Wealthfront have been using AI for years to aid in building customized investment portfolios and recommendations. Their algorithms use the customer’s risk assessment scores to pick the appropriate mix of cash and exchange-traded funds (ETFs) in a portfolio.
Other AI-powered portfolio optimization tools use unique inputs related to customer needs and goals to create an optimal blend of assets. With portfolio review tools, you can automatically scan and analyze existing portfolios. Within minutes, the AI will assess the overall strategy, identify strengths and weaknesses, and recommend improvements that an advisor may want to adopt for their client.
Risk Management
Financial advisors can also use AI tools to improve risk management for their clients, helping them more quickly identify areas of risk in a portfolio. With this technology, a financial advisor can more efficiently help their clients align their portfolios with their risk tolerance levels and reduce losses.
By comparing a client’s goals with the risk in their portfolio holdings, AI technology can identify recommended changes more quickly.
Note: For financial services firms that offer products and services to consumers, many AI tools use machine learning and predictive models to assess a borrower. The result is faster decisions about loan and credit applications.
Personalized Client Outreach
Effective client outreach takes time. AI can help financial advisors provide personalized messages based on individual customer data, such as:
- Past interactions
- Preferences
- Demographics
- Financial goals
This can save valuable time, increase customer connections, and be especially helpful for smaller firms, where there may not be a marketing department.
Morgan Stanley released its “AI @ Morgan Stanley Debrief,” an AI tool that takes notes, summarizes, and creates a first draft of communication for client meetings.
Creating Infographics
The popular freemium design tool Canva now includes AI integrations like an online text-to-image generator. Or, Canva’s Magic Design tool lets you input media and data, choose a few style preferences, and watch as it dynamically generates graphics.
Another option is Highcharts GPT, which can create interactive, no-code infographics with simple prompts. This application programming interface (API) lets you create charts in different languages, copy and paste data from Excel and have it visualized, pick your desired chart style, and then adjust as necessary.
If you’re not using internal research, you can use an AI research tool like Perplexity AI to find statistics (with sources) to generate your infographic.
Note: When creating graphics, be sure to fact-check the source for veracity, authority, and relevancy. GPT-4 “was trained using publicly available data (such as Internet data),” but it’s not clear how recent that data is, according to OpenAI. Also, LLMs are prone to inventing facts, so it’s always recommended to have a human review.
Creating Blog Content
When ChatGPT was released to the public in November 2022, people were wowed by the bot’s ability to spit out lengthy texts in seconds, based on a simple prompt. However, some experts suggest using it to brainstorm ideas and help with editing, rather than writing an entire piece from scratch, depending on your goal.
Hypotenuse AI is a valuable platform for creating full-length blog posts. You work with the tool to create and edit potential article titles, build an outline, add talking points, see sources, and generate the article. It’s interactive at every step, which can produce better results than simply inputting commands like “Write me a blog post about [topic].”
Regulatory Compliance
Financial services are among the most heavily regulated professional services. AI can help achieve and maintain compliance despite changes in regulatory or risk landscapes.
AI systems can identify suspicious transactions and flag compliance risks, making fraud detection much more efficient. AI can ensure that client onboarding processes meet regulatory standards by automating document collection and validation.
Lead Generation and Marketing
AI can help identify potential leads by analyzing social media activity, demographic data, and online behavior and leveraging predictive analytics to qualify them.
Once it collects and analyzes leads’ data, AI can craft personalized marketing campaigns for prospects based on their financial interests and preferences.
Workflow Automation
AI tools can automate time-consuming tasks like:
- Data entry
- Meeting scheduling
- Email management
Freeing advisors to focus on client relationships. In addition to automating administrative tasks, AI can automatically generate detailed financial reports with projections and insights, reducing manual work across levels.
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25 Leading AI Tools for Financial Advisors
1. Horizon: Meet Your New Co-Pilot
Horizon is your invisible meeting notes and real-time intelligence assistant, working behind the scenes to boost your performance in every conversation. It listens to:
- Meetings
- Transcribe discussions live
- Instantly generates summaries
- Smart prompts
- Actionable follow-ups
All visible to you alone. No more frantic note-taking or lost details; Horizon's seamless prompts and confidential notes keep you sharp while staying completely undetectable. Discover a new level of productivity and confidence in any meeting; experience Horizon today.
2. Axyon: AI Portfolio Management
Axyon is an AI platform designed to help investors, investment and asset managers, and financial advisors manage their investment portfolios more efficiently. It leverages AI to:
- Track relevant data
- Identify anomalies
- Detect potential risks
Allowing financial advisors to create optimized client portfolios. Axyon’s standout feature is its AI-driven investment strategies, which deliver excellence through machine learning algorithms, predictive analytics, and AI data processing capabilities.
3. Lead Genius: Targeted Prospecting for Financial Advisors
Lead Genius is an AI-powered lead generation platform designed for users with niche target audiences. This makes it a good solution for financial advisors who want to detect high-value leads without wasting time and other valuable resources on poorly targeted lead-generation strategies. The best thing about Lead Genius is that it can tell you who to focus your marketing efforts on from the get-go.
4. Kensho: AI Risk Analysis for Financial Advisors
Kensho, a product of S&P Global, is an AI-driven analytics platform that specializes in extracting insights from complex financial data. This makes it ideal for risk analysis in portfolio management, market evaluation, and operational decision-making. When it comes to analyzing potential risks, financial advisors will be most thankful for Kensho’s Nerd feature.
5. AdvisorEngine: Workflow Automation for Financial Advisors
AdvisorEngine is a robust wealth management platform designed to help financial advisors and asset managers work more efficiently. It allows financial advisors to streamline operations by:
- Automating workflows
- Enhancing client interactions
- Integrating critical tools
6. Intercom: AI Customer Service for Financial Advisors
Intercom is a tool designed to provide multichannel customer support. It can be a helpful solution for financial advisors who want to automate some of their customer support operations without compromising customer satisfaction. Intercom is more than just a chatbot, as it can be used across multiple channels.
7. NICE Actimize: Fraud Detection and Compliance
NICE Actimize is a leading provider of financial crime, risk, and compliance solutions. As such, financial institutions and advisors widely use it to detect and prevent fraudulent activities, ensure regulatory compliance, and manage risks effectively. Actimize’s key feature is its fraud detection and prevention capability.
8. Anyword: AI Copywriting for Financial Advisors
Anyword uses AI to pinpoint what kind of content will perform the best with your target audience, making it an excellent choice for financial advisors who want to leverage content to attract new clients without investing in an entire digital marketing team. Anyword’s predictive performance scoring is by far its most useful feature.
9. Datamaran: Analyzing ESG Data for Financial Advisors
ESG (environmental, social, and governance) data and factors must be considered when:
- Designing financial plans
- Investment strategies
- Portfolios
This is why financial advisors will find Datamaran handy, as it analyzes vast amounts of ESG data to provide contextual, actionable insights for confident decision-making. Datamaran’s AI algorithms enable it to monitor ESG risks and opportunities in real-time.
10. Alteryx: Comprehensive Data Analytics and Reporting
Alteryx is a powerful data analytics platform that enables financial advisors to:
- Streamline data preparation
- Perform advanced analytics
- Automate reporting processes
Since financial advisors need to analyze complex financial data to do their jobs and provide tangible proof of how their services benefit clients, Alteryx can be a valuable addition to their toolkit. Alteryx lets you use conversational AI to analyze data and pull complex insights.
11. Riskalyze: Understanding Client Risk Tolerance
Understanding a client’s tolerance for risk is vital. Riskalyze makes this easier by assessing and quantifying risk with its unique Risk Number. It’s more than just crunching numbers; it’s about building trust and creating sound financial plans.
12. Vise: AI Portfolio Management for Financial Advisors
Vise is an AI tool specifically designed for financial advisors. It helps by automating tasks like portfolio management, analysis, and rebalancing. Vise combines intelligent automation with personalized solutions, assisting advisors in managing multiple clients without losing the human touch.
13. ForwardLane: AI for Client Engagement
When it comes to client engagement, ForwardLane delivers AI-powered personalized interactions at scale. The tool gathers and analyzes data from various sources—like financial statements and market news and provides insights to share with clients.
14. Orion Advisor Tech: Comprehensive AI Tools for Wealth Management
Orion offers a comprehensive set of AI tools that enhance wealth management. One standout feature is its financial planning module, which identifies gaps in a client’s economic plan.
15. Holistiplan: AI for Tax Planning
Tax planning can be tricky, but Holistiplan automates many of the tasks involved. This AI-driven tool quickly scans tax documents and highlights opportunities for savings.
16. Zocks: AI for Meeting Productivity
Zocks is designed to enhance productivity and client relationship management for financial advisors by automating various meeting-related tasks.
17. AlphaSense: AI for Financial Research
AlphaSense is a leading enterprise-grade AI-driven intelligence platform built for robust market and investment research.
18. Bloomberg: AI for Financial Research
Bloomberg made its foray into genAI with its BloombergGPT large language model (LLM), which is purpose-built for finance and is trained on a vast range of financial data.
19. Fiscal.ai (FinChat.io): AI for Financial Analysis
Fiscal.ai is an AI-powered investment research platform combining institutional-grade financial data, analytics, and conversational AI.
20. Fintool: AI for Financial Research
Fintool is a generative AI tool designed specifically for financial professionals, such as analysts, portfolio managers, and investors.
21. edmundSEC: AI for Financial Document Analysis
edmundSEC is an AI-driven search engine designed to streamline financial research by providing access to SEC filings, earnings call transcripts, and other financial documents.
22. YCharts: Financial Research for Advisors and Investors
YCharts was built to democratize stock and investment research for asset managers, financial advisors, and individual investors.
23. Hebbia: AI for Analyzing Complex Financial Documents
Hebbia is a multi-agent AI productivity platform built to help financial, legal, and corporate teams extract insights from complex, unstructured documents at scale.
24. Verity: AI for Equity Research
Verity is an equity research platform for modern fund managers. It integrates AI and NLP capabilities to help streamline how analysts manage, organize, and generate investment theses and financial models.
25. Rogo: AI for Investment Banking
Rogo is a relatively new-to-market generative AI platform explicitly built for investment banks and private equity investors.
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Choosing the Right AI Tool for Financial Advisors
Low-cost or free AI tools for financial advisors may be tempting to use, but they ultimately cannot serve enterprise use cases. They may leave your organization susceptible to unreliable data and security risk.
This list encompasses a wide range of prices, but capabilities and features are usually closely tied to cost. The more features, content sets, and customization you require in your financial AI tool, the more budget you will likely need to spend.
Pinpoint Your Business Needs
What do you want your new AI assistant to help you accomplish? Are you looking for a tool that will help you summarize information, create content, and help with workflow productivity?
Or do you need an enterprise-grade tool that provides access to premium and proprietary content, protects your data and security, and has strong guardrails against hallucination? Depending on what you will be using the tool for, specific tools will fit your needs better than others.
Check for Integration Capabilities
Enterprise organizations benefit substantially from AI tools that can be applied to their internal content, promoting discoverability of internal knowledge, as well as team collaboration and productivity. If your organization has existing databases or repositories of financial information, look for a tool that can integrate with these internal systems to help bolster your research efforts and improve overall efficiency.
Consider Customization Options
The lower the cost of a financial AI tool is, the less customization you get. Consider whether you need a tool with customizable dashboards and alerts, or whether more generic options would suffice.
Suppose you want to tailor your AI tool to fit your organization’s specific research goals. In that case, it’s best to choose a more sophisticated option that will allow for this level of customization.
Identify the Type of Content You Need
The tools in this list vary considerably in terms of the type of content they provide access to. Some tools provide access only to public web data, tools that do not offer real-time data, and tools with much more robust content offerings that help you get a much more holistic and real-time view of the market.
Understanding the different types of content that AI tools can access can help you identify which tool will meet your needs.
Evaluate Data Protection and Compliance Standards
For organizations with sensitive data, it’s critical to select a financial AI tool that has robust compliance and end-to-end data security standards. For individual or consumer-grade usage, compliance and data privacy are less necessary.
Enterprise organizations that deal with confidential client information must ensure their AI tools are equipped with proper safeguards to protect against data breaches.
Try Horizon for Free − Experience the Future of Work Today
In a world where information is constantly changing, financial advisors must react quickly and with precision. Artificial intelligence tools, like Horizon, help professionals keep up with the pace of change so they can focus on what matters most to their clients. Horizon's AI meeting assistant enables you to finalize details efficiently so that you can deliver personalized responses and solutions to your clients promptly.
Gain Insights on Client Preferences And More
Horizon helps you record essential client meetings, whether they take place in person or over a video call. With Horizon, you no longer have to fret about taking notes and whether you’ll remember the details of your conversation later. Instead, you can focus on the discussion and use AI technology to uncover insights that can help you improve your client interactions.
For instance, the software provides real-time transcriptions of your meeting, allowing you to see summaries, actionable insights, and even prompts for follow-up questions as you navigate your conversation. Doing so helps you get a better understanding of your client’s needs and preferences so you can tailor your responses accordingly.
Never Miss A Detail Again
Horizon's AI meeting assistant also helps you uncover valuable information that may not have come up in conversation before. For example, let’s say you’re meeting with a client to discuss their estate plan.
During your discussion, you uncover essential details about their family dynamics and how they may impact future distributions. Horizon captures this vital information, so you can easily refer to it in future meetings to ensure you’re addressing any potential issues and personalizing your approach to the client’s unique situation.
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