Technology spend in wealth management is at an all-time high, and for good reason.
New platforms and AI-assisted planning tools could be a genuine step up on what they’re replacing. But ask an adviser six months into a rollout how it has gone, and you will often hear the same complaint: they are working around the new system, not through it.
The money is not the problem. What keeps going wrong is who the rollout actually gets built for.
During my blended career in industry and consulting, I have both line-managed and advised teams of private bankers and regulated financial advisers. The same frustration comes up every time.
Advisers get into this job to build trusted relationships with clients. But instead, they spend most of their week working through know-your-customer documentation and writing up suitability notes. That is not a complaint about paperwork, but the system that has lost sight of the job.
Here is the argument I keep putting to clients: stop asking what the platform specification requires and start asking what this looks like from the adviser’s chair and the client’s side of the table.
Build the rollout so those people stay in control of it, rather than being consulted once the direction is already set. That takes intentional structure and a critical look at the current rollout process.
Avoid a sledgehammer solution
Every rollout follows the same shape: a platform problem gets spotted, a system gets picked, a business case gets built. By the time advisers and clients get a say, the direction is already locked in.
Nobody asks whether this should be a rebuild or a retrofit. It defaults to a retrofit because that is the easier project to greenlight.
A retrofit inherits every constraint of the legacy business — workflows, decision rights and cost base — so the technology just runs the old model faster, with the return on the investment capped before the project begins.
A rebuild, however, questions how the business actually works and uses the technology to do it differently, which is where the upside sits.
Without this, what lands is a sledgehammer solution swung at a problem that needs a more considered tool.
Firms can buy the best system on the market and staff it with the brightest minds, but still underdeliver because nobody gave the human side of the change anywhere near the same attention as the technology.
Ignoring the human side will not cut it
Once number-crunching is commoditised, what separates one wealth manager from another is exactly what cannot be commoditised: judgment, experience, empathy and the kind of instinct that comes from years of client conversations no AI has sat through.
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BETA feature — this feature is still being tested and developed
Every firm will soon have much the same AI, but not every firm will get the best out of its people.
The quality of an adviser’s advice comes down to two things: how well they actually know their client and how well they can prove it on paper. AI is very good at the second part, but the first still has to come from the adviser.
The relationship, the intuition and the time invested in a person that make a client trust the recommendation in front of them are what keep an adviser commercially productive, not how fast they can process a file.
That is the part firms keep missing. Getting the technology right while ignoring the human side will not cut it.
That shows up sharpest with junior advisers.
The old apprenticeship model had a graduate learn to read a client by observing real meetings and grinding through years of groundwork.
AI now handles a good chunk of that, which moves the real skill elsewhere: predicting how a client will react to an AI-generated recommendation and knowing how to navigate that conversation.
That is a harder skill to build than the one it is replacing, and firms only build it by keeping a person in the loop at every stage of a client relationship.
Buying AI is not the hard part
Choosing the technology is the easy part. The leadership work is aligning on who the change is for, deciding decision rights when the system and the adviser disagree and rewarding judgment, not just adoption.
None of that is about the paperwork. The record-keeping is what keeps advisers and clients within regulatory bounds, and it is exactly what AI is best at. What it cannot do is replace years of shared experience with a client, or the relationship that experience builds.
None of this is an argument for less AI. It is an argument against firms who think buying AI is the hard part.
A client does not hand their retirement plan to an algorithm. They hand it to a person they have decided to trust on relationship and instinct as much as the numbers in front of them.
The wealth managers who come out ahead will be measured less by their AI spend than by whether it made their advisers sharper at the one thing clients actually pay for.
Emiko Caerlewy-Smith is a partner at Elixirr
