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A tectonic shift is underway, according to leading figures in the wealth management industry, one that is not driven by macroeconomic trends or market volatility, but by generative artificial intelligence ( GenAI ).
GenAI isn’t just another tool in the stack, it’s fundamentally reshaping how wealth is managed, advice is delivered and clients are served, agree all three speakers – representing Arta Finance, EFG Bank and Capital One – on the “Generative AI in Finance” panel discussion at the recent SuperAI gathering in Singapore.
Arta Finance co-founder and a former Google Pay product leader Charles Dong brings the most aggressive challenge to the legacy private banking model, saying: “The wealth management pyramid is being flattened. We’re bringing the capabilities of a family office – domain expertise in tax, insurance and portfolio construction – into everyone’s pocket through a suite of specialized AI agents.
“Arta’s ‘research analyst’ agent now replicates deep diligence workflows that once took weeks, empowering users with hedge fund-level insights in minutes; and, critically, those agents come without commissions or conflicts of interest. Unlike human advisers, AI doesn’t upsell, it optimizes.”
EFG Bank’s chief AI officer Sigrid Rouam offers a view from inside a traditional Swiss private bank undergoing digital transformation. With high-net-worth clients spanning continents and jurisdictions, Rouam sees the greatest AI gains in automating complexity.
“Our relationship managers spend up to 70% of their time on non-advisory work,” she points out. “GenAI agents are already reducing that burden, streamlining onboarding, compliance and product due diligence. The result is more face time with clients – and more strategic conversations.”
Augmenting advisers
Capital One’s vice-president of applied research Sambit Sahu emphasizes how AI’s evolution, from basic machine learning to agentic large language models, is enabling three major shifts:
“These models mimic human reasoning at scale,” he notes, “and can cut through massive datasets to deliver insights in seconds.”
As well, Sahu stresses the underlying horsepower AI brings, noting: “These aren’t just chatbots, they’re reasoning engines. AI can process enormous volumes of multimodal data, text, filings, market prices, sentiment and mimic human reasoning.”
That capability, according to Sahu, unlocks two key advantages, deeper personalization at scale, and faster, higher-confidence decision support.
Again all three, however, agreed that in their business, trust is absolutely critical and not something on which they can compromise. Additionally, when using AI in this context, they emphasize that it’s not enough for the technology to simply work well, it must also be explainable as clients and regulators need to understand how the AI arrived at its decisions or recommendations.
In other words, AI transparency is not a bonus feature, it’s a core requirement when dealing with people’s money.
EFG’s Rouam, whose companies robust governance structure involves compliance, legal, information security and risk teams, states: “Every model has to be transparent and auditable.”
Dong adds: “Clients deserve to know not just the ‘what’ but the ‘why’. AI should tell you how it got to a recommendation, and it should be better at that than a human.”
The new model of wealth management isn’t theoretical, the trio of speakers agree, it’s here, deployed and iterating fast. AI is augmenting advisers, not replacing them, but the institutions and advisers who will eventually win will be those who embrace the technology,
