Anthropic is now taking Claude directly into the financial-advisory workflow.
Anthropic is now taking Claude directly into the financial-advisory workflow.
Claude for Financial Advisors will be able to pull information from CRMs, custodians, portfolio reports and meeting notes; help with review preparation, follow-ups and compliance checks, while keeping advisors responsible for approving the output. Importantly, the advisor remains responsible for reviewing and approving the output.
At first glance, this looks like another story about productivity.
I think the more interesting question is what happens to the 'value of advice' when much of the information-processing around it becomes dramatically easier.
For a long time, parts of wealth management have been built around an information advantage: access to research, the ability to compare products, construct reports, synthesise market developments and present recommendations. AI will steadily compress that advantage.
But the hardest decisions we encounter with families are so because the information is incomplete, the future is unknown, and the choices are deeply personal.
Families with significant wealth never paid wealth advisors for simply “better investment ideas". In fact, the most consequential financial decisions I have seen families make rarely suffer from a lack of data.
They look like:
- Should I finally reduce my holding in the company that created most of my wealth?
- How much of our family's capital should remain liquid?
- Should we back our child's entrepreneurial venture? And if so, as parents or as investors?
- How much investment risk is appropriate when we no longer need to take much risk at all?
- Should the next generation begin participating in investment decisions now, or only after they inherit?
- When an exciting private investment comes through a trusted friend, how do we separate the opportunity from the relationship?
- During a market correction, is the portfolio actually wrong or are we simply uncomfortable?
These and many such problems require context, judgement, trust and, occasionally, the willingness to tell someone something they would rather not hear.
AI and Advisors are not on opposite sides of this transition. Used well, AI could remove a great deal of the mechanical work that surrounds advice and give advisors more time for the part that actually matters: 'thinking alongside the client.'
Advice can get more efficient. But the standard for a wealth advisor is higher: Can it help us make advice more thoughtful?