WHY WE ONLY LEARN WHEN WE REPEAT
Thursday, January 18, 2018 by Andre Kurkowski | Uncategorized
How Amazon's Alexa will upend wealth management
Tuesday, August 22, 2017 by Andre Kurkowski | Uncategorized
How Amazon's Alexa will upend wealth management
Alexa, manage my practice.
Advisors wondering how Amazon will enter wealth management should look to its cloud computing arm, Amazon Web Services, which is pitching the natural language processing, machine-learning brain behind its voice interactive service to wirehouses, broker-dealers and robo advisors.
Already, UBS has partnered with Amazon to enable clients and non-clients of the bank to get answers to financial and economic questions through Alexa. LPL's CEO Dan Arnold gave a thumbs-up to the idea of integrating Alexa into the workflow of advisors. Fidelity is testing Amazon Web Services applications while Capital One is a customer. Betterment is already using 20 different applications as well.
Still, planners might be forgiven for wondering what use a glowing little electronic cake could be to their practice. In fact, there are a variety of ways that the technology underpinning Alexa will likely spread throughout wealth management, industry experts say, as it automates client interaction and even advice requests.
"Many important platform shifts start out looking like a toy, and then become the primary way that the younger generation communicates," says Lex Sokolin, director of fintech strategy at Autonomous Research. "Look at mobile apps, social networks, and now conversational interfaces and virtual reality. It's those companies that innovate at the edges that can capture new customers."
