ChatGPT Can Now Give Advice By Linking to Clients’ Bank Accounts. Can They Trust It?

Chat, should my clients be sending you their account statements?

ChatGPT will now let some users link their personal bank accounts to the software, rolling out a suite of personal finance tools for paid users of its Pro service, OpenAI announced last week. Some of those tools include a dashboard of their portfolio and payments, as well as a function that lets users ask personalized questions about their specific financial situations. More than 200 million people already come to the platform every month with questions about their investments, the company said in a statement. It’s a major foray into the world of finance for one of the most valuable private companies in the world.

While the tools may be useful for newcomers who don’t have an advisor or want a broad financial plan, they might not be helpful to advised clients with more complicated financial plans, said Chris Maudlin, senior wealth advisor at AlphaCore Wealth Advisory. “[The ChatGPT tool] is great from a very basic budgeting and planning standpoint,” he said. “But it will always fail from a complex needs [standpoint].”

PhAIsing It In

Many advisors agree LLMs are great for some clients who want to access quick and simple financial information, but they have concerns about advisors’ fiduciary duty and compliance responsibilities when an AI is in the driver’s seat. “If someone got bad advice, would they sue OpenAI?” said Andrew Herzog, a CFP with the Watchman Group. He added that giving advice requires having some skin in the game. “You go out on a limb and take a calculated risk to build a business around financial advice because you believe you can responsibly direct your fellow man. AI couldn’t care less.”

Still, if AI is wading into finance, then finance is diving into AI. Rick Wurster, CEO of Charles Schwab, said last week that AI could soon be used to address clients with less than $1 million in assets. And in April, Citi released its own AI client assistant tool named Sky. AI in investment management will evolve through three stages, said Tal Schwartz, CEO & Founder of Ai Funds, whose proprietary model, BAILA, has been serving as an investment strategist since 2019. These stages include:

• Insights. Here, AI produces research, market commentary and summaries that advisors read and apply.
• Assistant. The AI assistant works as a co-pilot, drafting client communications and making recommendations, while humans still make the final calls.
• Strategist. At this level, AI can serve as the investment strategist itself, reading market conditions and constructing portfolios from scratch.

Assisted AI Living. Most of what is being rolled out today lives in stages one and two, Schwartz said, in the world of so-called “AI-assisted” advising. Regardless of what some advisors might think about the capacity of AI to give sound advice, however, it appears there is demand: 90% of Gen Z users found AI-generated financial advice to be worthwhile or profitable, according to a recent survey.

“This is the natural evolution,” Schwartz said. “AI is becoming pervasive in wealth management, and over time, AI-managed strategies will manage a meaningful share of global AUM.”

Additional reporting by Griffin Kelly.