Wealth managers may be misleading their regular clients and automating the services they currently have, according to a Bloomberg report.
The article unearths revealing jargon used by Debasish Patnaik, a partner at the consulting firm McKinsey & Company: “wealthy masses,” referring to wealth management clients with $1 million or less in liquid assets. If you are very wealthy, I hate to break the news to you that apparently your wealth manager never cared about you and may no longer be manually compiling those reports on how things are going in your portfolio.
“The higher-net-worth customer now gets something close to private banking quality thanks to AI,” Patnaik tells Bloomberg. This, according to Patnaik, changes the landscape when it comes to what financial institutions need from potential wealth managers.
Meanwhile, the “truly wealthy,” to use Bloomberg’s term, will get increasingly personalized service as wealth management further bifurcates into automated and ultra-premium versions, according to Patnaik. The new services the job will require make an estate manager look like a cross between a mafia consiglieri and a father. Companies will need workers with skills such as the ability to manage succession events, an understanding of “family dynamics,” the ability to decide “which family member inherits what” for the masters of the universe, and the warmth needed to “hold their hand” when the market takes a negative turn.
Since AI can’t do any of this, Patnaik says companies will “give a lot of thought to hiring to achieve this.”
But your experience as part of the disgusting wealthy rabble may soon not involve a real wealth manager at all. Patnaik tells Bloomberg that companies will need to hire for AI and automation software oversight roles: “specialists, behavioral data scientists, personalization architects, and human oversight professionals.”
Citi is at the forefront of this change, the Bloomberg article indicates. Joe Bonanno, Citi’s director of wealth intelligence, tells Bloomberg that his firm is deploying “AI-backed software,” such as a chatbot that tells clients how to manage their kids’ college funds, and a push-button system that can “compose an email from the chief investment officer and distill what it means to the client.”
Through all this AI, Citi apparently believes it will increase customer engagement. Bonanno tells Bloomberg that “engagement keeps customers happier and more loyal.” Personally speaking, I love being happy and clingy.
But none of this can matter according Elon Musk, everyone’s favorite infinite money cheat code finder, who said in an interview in January that thanks to AI, everything we all know about saving money is about to change. “We’re at the top of the roller coaster, and it’s about to go down,” Musk said on the Moonshots podcast with Peter Diamandis, not entirely clear whether that’s good or bad. “Don’t worry about saving money to retire in 10 or 20 years. It won’t matter,” he told Diamandis.
Whatever that means, great, Most of us aren’t successfully saving for retirement anyway. I can’t wait to see what the near future holds for both rich and poor.
