Every minute of every hour we hear more about the vast, sometimes scary power of artificial intelligence. We’ve invited it into our homes and businesses. In some cases, it has come in uninvited.
Last week, the President of Microsoft, Brad Smith, wrote a piece about the need for both regulation and corporate responsibility to ensure that technology is used for good.
And technology can do incredible good. Particularly when technologies such as AI, machine learning and natural language processing (NLP) are used not to replace people, but to enhance the human connection between business professionals and their customers.
Nathan Stevenson, the CEO of Forwardlane, spoke to me about mindboggling things his company is doing in wealth management. Forwardlane is a cognitive application and platform that is deployed in a wealth management firm’s infrastructure to help wealth managers synthesize, analyze and organize the infinite data they draw on to make informed recommendations.
Forwardlane’s platform and their expanding set of APIs enable wealth managers to absorb and activate internal and external qualitative and quantitative data in a fraction of the time it takes an expert analyst to get only a fractional view.
“Inside The Tornado” of hypergrowth
For those too young to know Geoffrey Moore, his books Crossing The Chasm and Inside The Tornado examined companies in hypergrowth. Their visions align so profoundly with mass market need and opportunity that the entrepreneurs must belt in while hurtling toward the upper right quadrant.
Stevenson, the son of a tech entrepreneur and an elementary school teacher, is a native of beautiful and often volatile South Africa. His comfort with volatility and his own background in serial entrepreneurship, quantitative finance, and enterprise architecture have made him perfectly fit for the ride he is on.
Forwardlane, based in New York City and London, was founded in 2016 and rapidly advanced to two pre-eminent accelerators, TechStars and FinTech Innovation Lab. These relationships enabled Forwardlane to work directly with private banks and leading wealth managers to understand their overwhelming everyday reality and fine tune the delivery strategy for the platform and APIs.
Wealth managers, like the rest of us, are at peak human performance. They can’t work any harder, or research any longer, to derive the insight they need to help their clients. They need technology to help them make sense of a vast array of continuous data across a huge collection of portfolios with highly individualized goals.
Wealth management reimagined to enable white glove treatment for the other 99% of us
Extremely wealthy individuals have plenty of analysts working to support them, but, according to Stevenson, there are approximately 38 Million other portfolios under management in the U.S. Working directly with wealth managers at the accelerator, he found that some managed 200 to 500 portfolios.
If your wealth manager has 500 accounts, you may get 30 minutes a month of mindshare. That is unless the company behind him or her is tapping into technological advances to help them provide more timely and continuous insight tied directly to your goals. This is where Forwardlane has delivered the biggest bang for the wealth management buck.
Using their technology, wealth managers can look into their book of business, organize their day predictably, derive real-time insight and make optimization recommendations that consider specific portfolio risk budgets.
Your wealth manager can call you and say, “Margaret, I’m looking at some trend data on the mix we have you in, and I think we can optimize your investments.” While on the call, the manager can key specific thoughts that Margaret has into an interface and raise immediate and real-time insight that may inform a rebalancing or change in strategy.
How does Margaret feel? She feels cared for, taken seriously and she knows that her wealth manager is “in the know.” When I first wrote the last sentence, I had a typo and stated, “in the now.” Both apply.
How does a wealth manager feel? Highly informed and powerful. Stevenson says they have benchmarked Forwardlane’s performance in two independent tests against 6 other options for expert analysis and found themselves to be 200% to 300% better at recognizing connections in financial data. This enables everyday wealth managers to be expert analysts and highly proactive with their clients.
Stevenson recently appeared on the Thomson Reuters program, “Supercharging Wealth Management with AI,” and equated their efficiency gains to giving wealth managers 20% of their time back—a full day a week—to build their book of business or build it better with existing clients.
Transformative strategy & immense opportunity grease the skids for capital
Although Stevenson has only been at it for 2 years, the company has raised an impressive $6.3 Million, including a second investment from one lead investor in just 8 months.
They have key partners invested in helping them continue to connect the dots with their key audiences, not just in terms of portfolio management, but in the delivery of a superior brand experience to customers.
This impressive list of parnters includes Thomson Reuters Wealth Management, Morningstar, Salesforce, Mediamath, IBM Cloud and Pershing.
AI—Can you make sense of the economy, the markets & help optimize my portfolio?
Stevenson talks about the trust lost during the financial crisis when 401ks became “101ks.” The world is still volatile, and no one wants to repeat the kind of nail-biting insecurity that occurred back then.
Wealth managers have brought their clients back from the brink. But what if they could keep them from getting there in the first place? What if they could bring them back from the edge faster or better? What if they had the distinct competitive advantage of using AI, machine learning and NLP to not only drive better performance but expand investor confidence? And what if they could use this technology to change the promise of 401ks to “601ks” or greater.
Entire livelihoods and life’s works are at stake in this game.
The people that know me, and now you, understand that I do not welcome Alexa in my home, because just-in-time toilet paper is an insufficient need for the personal privacy rights I surrender.
However, I am completely onboard with my wealth manager having tools such as Forwardlane at his fingertips. In fact, I’m going to forward this blog to him as soon as I hit publish.
