Robo-adviceMar 6 2018

Wealth Wizards launches AI robo system

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Wealth Wizards launches AI robo system

Wealth Wizards, the robo-adviser majority owned by LV, has launched an artificial intelligence service which will learn how advisers serve their clients and replicate that house view.

The white-labelled system, called Turo, will be able to learn which factors a particular advice firm emphasises when it gives advice and follow that after examining a sample of the business's past work.

For example with defined benefit transfers it will learn what weight a firm gives to economic factors such as critical yield against psychological ones such as security of income.

Wealth Wizards said Turo will effectively act as a paraplanner, gathering data, scouring the market and presenting its findings to the adviser to be signed off.

Andrew Firth, the chief executive of Wealth Wizards, said its system was able to slash the amount of time it would take to provide a recommendation by a factor of 10.

He said: "We think this technology is going to bring the next wave of new thinking to robo-advice over the next few years.

"The paraplanner does most of the heavy lifting involved in giving financial advice but there is still a human being talking to the client at the beginning and at the end.

"The challenge for us has been, and remains, the ability to configure our robo-advice to deliver advice as a particular brands wants to do it. Each brand has their own way of giving advice, their own house view.

"We have developed an artificial intelligence that allows us to configure our advice as they firm like to give it."

Wealth Wizards revealed it was looking to include artificial intelligence in its robo-paraplanner to FTAdviser last year.

Mr Firth said the system currently worked best when handling binary decisions, such as whether a client should transfer their defined benefit pension, take equity release or go into drawdown.

He said Turo would also flag up cases which fell into a "grey area" and which would need to be looked at by a financial adviser - but he said these cases would become fewer and fewer as the system learnt more.

Mr Firth added: "We have built this based on the firm's advice so we can use it to spot outliers. This means you can use this same model as a compliance tool, and spot anomalies."

Wealth Wizards, which is majority owned by LV, is currently developing more features for Turo, meaning enhancements such as voice recognition could be introduced "in the near future".

Peet Denny, chief technology officer of Wealth Wizards, said: "The benefit of Turo is that users are able to stay one-step ahead of the sector, as Turo enables a range of advice services including advice on investments, protection and mortgages.

"Our AI solution supports our vision of empowering the adviser of the future, bringing nearer a better world in which expert financial advice becomes accessible and affordable to everyone."

Mark Polson, of the Lang Cat consultancy, said: "Something that machine learns how advisers do things is an interesting concept but does it not then learn their flaws and their biases or do they design those out?"

But Martin Dodd, a financial adviser at Wolverhampton-based Midlands Investment Agency, said: "I am far from a luddite in that I think we have to embrace new technology and the advice community does have some responsibility towards providing advice to society as a whole.

"But it doesn't sound very client-focused to me. It sounds very focused on the adviser but that is me and I suspect a lot of advisers will have a completely opposed view."

damian.fantato@ft.com