Your wealth manager might soon be an algorithm. Intellect Design Arena has just landed on Forrester's radar for its AI platform built to automate the advisor's role. Joining me on Zoom is Hari Menon, Partner and Executive Vice President of Intellect Design Arena and MFTA member. Hari, welcome to Wall Street to Mena. A major research firm like Forrester has now named you a notable vendor. What does that actually get you?
That is a good question. Whilst it is always nice to get validation from industry experts and analysts, it gives confidence to us that we are on the right track. It gives confidence to our customers that they are working with the right partner. But what actually wins the trust of our customers is what we deliver as outcomes. It is definitely a step in the right direction — but not the only thing we look for.
Your AI agents flag idle funds and rebalancing opportunities before a human advisor even looks at the account. At what point does the AI stop assisting and start making decisions?
Our philosophy is simple — AI should elevate human judgement, not replace it. Financial advisors have years of experience seeing patterns. What AI is good at is doing that at scale — identifying patterns across thousands of accounts that would be very difficult for any individual to monitor manually. It can nudge the advisor and give the right information. But the decision is always with the advisor. It just expedites things so that advisors can make the most of an opportunity without delay.
Banks love to say a human is in the loop. How much of the decision is really still a human decision?
I would actually pivot that question. The human is in control. Always. AI is in the loop — not the other way around. The human advisor, the human regulator, the human risk manager own the end-to-end process. They are in control. What AI is doing is helping them make those decisions faster. So the way we look at it: AI is in the loop, not human in the loop.
Can an AI system actually catch a compliance breach faster than a trained risk officer — or is that still just marketing?
It is definitely not marketing — but it is also definitely not replacing experienced risk officers. No organisation can afford to have a risk officer sitting beside every financial advisor. What AI can do is look at patterns and transactions and identify potential risks or incorrectly executed transactions. But the decision still goes back to a human expert. There are only two levers in wealth management: the number of wealth managers, and how much each wealth manager can do. You cannot exponentially increase the number of wealth managers. So how do you exponentially increase the capacity of each one? That is where AI comes in — taking away the compliance operations, the business operations, the advisory operations — so that advisors can spend more time on the important relationship decisions and risk officers can spend more time on the important regulatory decisions.
You call this the Great Recalibration. What happens to a wealth manager who refuses to adapt?
The most expensive transformation is the one you are not doing. Because it is going to cost you more whenever you decide to do it — and you will have to do it eventually. We are calling this the Great Recalibration because over the last 12 to 18 months and over the next two to three years, we are seeing a significant change in how wealth operates worldwide. Growing client expectations, increasing data complexity, and a shortage of experienced advisors are all making this more complex. Add to that the fact that many organisations are still running on legacy systems and legacy architecture — and that combination makes it very difficult. This is where it is critically important to pick the right platform and the right architecture so you can move forward without building another set of legacy applications that you will have to replace in five years. The right architecture is microservices-ready, API-ready, headless, cloud-ready, and agnostic to AI and cloud providers. Without that, you are going to be stuck with one player on another loop, and in the same place in three to five years time.
Thank you, Hari Menon, for joining us today.
Thank you so much.
