Wealth management firms are adopting AI tools to help advisors save time and grow their books.Alfieri/iStockPhoto / Getty Images
After seeing strong adoption of its in-house artificial intelligence tool, Royal Bank of Canada is piloting new custom AI tools for advisors.
Neil McLaughlin, group head of RBC Wealth Management and Insurance, says the wealth management division already has about 7,500 weekly users of the bank’s generic artificial intelligence tool, RBC Assist. The internally developed generative AI allows advisors to input sensitive client data safely as they ask it about portfolio or tax strategies, for example.
They’re now focusing on consistent outcomes from those queries.
“We’re really going through and saying, ‘What is the best prompt that has been written to do these generic tasks, and how do we not have 1,000 poppies blooming?’” Mr. McLaughlin says.
RBC expects to generate between $700-million to $1-billion in enterprise value from AI by 2027, and the wealth division is looking to contribute to that by freeing up time for advisors to grow their books.
The bank is now piloting three custom AI tools for advisors at RBC Dominion Securities Inc. and RBC Phillips, Hager & North Investment Counsel Inc.
A meeting prep tool, which has been rolled out nationally, is able to scan a client’s relevant information – from financial plans to portfolios to all previous communication – and recommend the top issues to address at a meeting.
“What we’re hearing from advisors is that it’s saving them 30 to 45 minutes in terms of preparing for and/or wrapping up a meeting – which is a lot when you think about how many clients an advisor would meet," Mr. McLaughlin says.
A portfolio recommendation tool will be piloted next year. This tool will let an advisor know when a client might be ready for more alternative investment products, for example, or flag clients that advisors should reach out to based on what’s happening in their portfolios, even if a conversation isn’t scheduled for a few months.
A client prospecting tool, meanwhile, will be piloted later this year, aiming to help advisors identify potential clients and make better use of their time when it comes to business development.
As for what advisors do with that extra time, Mr. McLaughlin says the AI tools should lead to more conversations with clients, more needs identified, more time to prospect and, ultimately, a larger book.
What it won’t lead to, he says, is a shrinking advisor headcount.
Providing advice to more Canadians who have smaller portfolios “is probably the bigger opportunity versus thinking about how do we stay flat or shrink our headcount,” he says.
Taking on more clients is less likely in the high-touch, complex high-net-worth and ultra-high-net-worth segments, though, where time saved from AI will likely go back into existing relationships.
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