AI could bring wealth-manager-style investment service to the mass market, the managing partner of a major retail broker said on Thursday.
Penny Pennington of Edward Jones told Semafor World Economy that great financial advice needs to be tailored to the individual. Until recently, “only very wealthy people could get a dynamically managed portfolio” like that, she said. But increasingly AI can “provide that kind of dynamism in the background, at vast scale.”
If a financial adviser is spending less time directly building and managing the portfolio, she said, it frees that adviser up to “spend that time being a human… getting underneath the life of that family, about what they’re afraid of, about what happens next.”
It comes at a crucial time, she said, because the greatest wealth transfer in history is underway: $124 trillion dollars will be passed over the next 20 years from the silent and baby-boomer generations to the generations below.
Many investors are also over 65, and “fraud is ramping up like never before,” she said.
“We can use AI tools to see inside transaction patterns and engagement patterns,” Pennington said, to intervene in cases of potential fraud more quickly. “There is a special place in hell for the people who are preying on those senior investors,” she said.