Customized smart advisor for a next-gen financial advisor experience

Being a financial advisor (FA) can be richly rewarding, not just in terms of earnings but also in making meaningful impact in people’s lives. However, it can also be stressful to manage clients’ finances through market volatility.

A day in a life of a financial advisor typically involves:

1. Prospecting new clients and financial planning
2. Meeting and servicing existing clients
3. Market research and strategy planning for rebalancing and trading
4. Administrative activities such as regulatory reporting, responding to client queries, etc.
5. Continuous learning and research around new trends and regulations

Apart from daily activities, any special or adverse events such as the Brexit vote/war in Ukraine require immediate attention by the FA.

Typical FA challenges

FAs need to make time for market research over and above their demanding routine activities to keep pace with market trends and draw up strategies to remain competitive. FAs often struggle to keep up with real-time market changes and client needs. To stay ahead of the investment curve, it is imperative for FAs to:

• Generate critical market insights by assimilating market data from various sources
  • Analyze the impact on client portfolios
  • Take appropriate action to reduce risk and/or improve returns on investment
• Generate client-specific intelligence
  • Help conduct meaningful conversations with clients
  • Take appropriate action based on clients’ current needs and market insights
  • Align with clients’ sustainability goals

To efficiently fit these tasks into an already demanding daily schedule is a tough ask for the FAs. There is a real need for an automated and smarter solution. We have analyzed this business need and leveraged next-gen AI/ML technologies to develop an intelligent solution for FAs.

Introducing Zensar’s AI/ML-driven Smart Advisor

Our AI-powered Smart Advisor has been designed to empower FAs to move forward with direction, purpose, and velocity. It assimilates market data related to the FAs and client’s portfolio and analyzes market news to arrive at positive/negative sentiments at market/sector/portfolio/stock level that reflect the future outlook. It processes vast amounts of information and suggests meaningful actions to improve returns. Smart Advisor also considers the firm’s ESG risk scores in calculating the portfolio-level ESG exposure.

FAs gain a competitive edge as Smart Advisor aligns market insights and client expectations. It does so by analyzing and processing clients’ social media footprints to determine their life events.

This arms FAs with client intelligence to generate specific strategies for each client. In addition, FAs can now have meaningful real-time conversations, be personally engaged with the client, and stay in touch regularly.

The Smart Advisor advantage

AI-powered Smart Advisor makes life easier for FAs by reducing day-to-day efforts, saving time, and keeping clients happier with:

Intelligent insights: Smart Advisor continuously scans multiple data sources for market data, events, and news. The AI engine determines market sentiments that affect overall portfolios. It manages numerous client portfolios at the same time.

Improved portfolio returns: Smart Advisor augments and enhances advisors’ decision-making by suggesting the next best action. The advisor can choose to go with the recommendations provided by Smart Advisor or override them to take appropriate action on the most impacted stocks in the portfolio.

Client focus: Smart Advisor facilitates better client relationship management and enhances advisor engagement through deeper understanding of clients’ expectations. Its underlying technology positions clients at the forefront and makes them the center of attention.

Hyper-personalized interactions: Smart Advisor’s client-based intelligence around clients’ key life events such as birthdays, anniversaries, graduation, etc., based on social listening, enriches client conversations, and enables hyper-personalized communications. It suggests appropriate touchpoints to connect with clients, sets up meetings at regular intervals, prepares the agenda for these meetings, and keeps track of all past discussions as notes.

Optimizes administrative tasks: Financial advisors need to perform numerous administrative tasks that have little value addition but could pose significant downside risk if done incorrectly. These repeatable, rule-based tasks — responding to queries, filing regulatory reports, etc. — are automated by Smart Advisor.

Continuous learning: Smart Advisor enables continuous learning. It scans the latest products, regulatory updates, and macroeconomic trends. It subsequently understands this information to educate the financial advisor (sustainable investing based on ESG scores, investing in NFTs, etc.).

Smart and fast

The Smart Advisor solution optimizes advisors’ daily activities, generates insights by scanning the market 24/7, recommends the next best actions, and strengthens client relationships by facilitating FAs to engage with clients at a personalized level. Smart Advisor not just helps financial advisors save time, money, and effort, but improves accuracy and efficiency in their daily dealings.