FINANCIAL ADVICE


From a strategic point of view, major institutions in the financial services industry are increasingly coming to realise that whether they start as a bank, life assurer or fund manager, the core of their mission for their customers is to improve their financial well-being, and nothing can impact this more than expert financial guidance and advice. It is also a tangible way to have a meaningful and differentiated relationship with a customer, as opposed to increasingly being a commodity or utility provider of financial solutions.


Moving obstacles One of the most exciting areas in consumer financial services at the moment is the digital transformation of personalised advice and guidance. Bringing the application of expert systems and explainable artificial intelligence (AI) together in an omni-channel platform means that institutions can deliver efficient, consistent, compliant guidance and advice at scale. This addresses the advice gap, allowing many simpler customer journeys to be completed online, and making existing expert advisers much more efficient and able to focus on their clients’ key needs while simultaneously scaling up.


AI and complex financial advice At Wealth Wizards we have built our white-label platform, Turo, which enables the automation of much of the process of personalised guidance and advice. We support a 90%-plus rate of automated recommendations and, in a time and motion study with one of our institutional customers, we showed savings of over 50% on processing time while supporting the highest standards of consistency and compliance. This includes complex areas of advice and


guidance such as retirement planning. The platform utilises a ‘smart fact-finding’ capability where client information is captured digitally to enable:


• preference scoring – allowing ‘soft facts’ such as wants, preferences and objectives to be factored into the automation;


• logical decision trees – allowing assessment of factors such as eligibility;


• optimisation of financial projections, using needs and resources as constraints;


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• personalised recommendations, automatically populated into a coherent complete document for review by the adviser. For complex areas of advice that need review


by advisers and also, potentially, supervisors and compliance officers, we have developed a form of ‘explainable AI’. This improves the clarity of complex advice decisions by showing explicitly how that advice is based on the balance of various key factors which impact the recommendation.


Training data The key training data comes from ‘golden’ reference cases – these are previous advice cases already reviewed or created as examples and known to be compliant and suitable advice. The inputs include the full client data set and the corresponding decision from these cases, plus key factors that can influence the decision. The machine learning (ML) model then calculates the implied weighting of those factors based on the whole golden case set. Once the fact-find data set is complete, the next advice case can use the implied weights and factor values to give an ‘AI decision’. This can be used to support the adviser and the oversight function in reviewing cases. Once a case has been reviewed as compliant and suitable it can be added to the training data. As well as supporting the adviser interaction, the platform enables digital self-serve journeys, too. The clients get an initial financial wellness score and recommendations for improvement. The score and recommended next steps are based on financial planning principles driven by algorithms created by our financial planning experts. But we don’t force clients to instantly address the recommendations in sequence. As well as personalised recommendations, we give clients a choice of how to consume all of the other content and journeys.


“Bringing the application of expert systems and explainable AI together in an omni-channel platform means that institutions can deliver efficient, consistent, compliant guidance and advice at scale”


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