Joe Bonanno, Managing Director, Global Head of Data Analytics & Innovation at Citi, recently sat down with Communify to share his take on the most compelling AI opportunities in wealth. Digital transformation in the financial industry demands the tangible, high-impact implementation of proven AI use cases in wealth management. The time for merely recognizing AI's potential is over; it’s time to put the tools into action.
Wealth management firms overwhelmingly recognize the pivotal role that Artificial Intelligence will play in shaping the future.
According to Accenture’s North American Wealth Management Advisor survey, a whopping 96% of respondents believe Gen AI can revolutionize client servicing and investment management. Furthermore, 97% of advisors surveyed foresee AI’s most significant impact within the next 3 years.
However, while 78% said their firms are experimenting with gen AI, only 41% state that their firm is already scaling adoption as a core part of their business.
Clearly, there’s a massive gap between aspiration and execution. The industry has done the talking; now it’s time to deliver.
And bridging that execution gap requires proven, compliance-friendly technology.
As a leading provider of Financial AI, Communify delivers 10+ million precise AI insights daily to global investors and investment professionals. Our MIND™ AI platform is industry-leading because of its proprietary P.O.D. (Proof of Dimension) Framework, which ensures compliance-grade generative AI. MIND™ AI powers mission-critical use cases across the financial industry landscape, including wealth management and retail brokerage.
To understand these use cases and how to successfully make this transition, Joe Bonanno, Managing Director, Global Head of Data Analytics & Innovation at Citi, recently sat down with Finextra TV to share his take on the most compelling AI opportunities.
4 Essential AI Use Cases in Wealth Management for Future Growth
1. AI-Powered Summarization and Next Best Actions
The most common point of friction for advisors is the time spent on administrative tasks immediately following a client interaction.
The pain point is clear: after a productive client call, an advisor might spend 20 minutes logging detailed notes, often missing nuances due to the need to rush to a back-to-back meeting.
Joe Bonanno highlights this by noting that firms are using AI to take the entire conversation, transcribe and summarize it, and then intelligently determine the call’s intent, such as a portfolio review or a one-time investment discussion.
This output can then feed into a "next best action" model, using data from the last several calls combined with a client's holdings and balances to prepare a comprehensive pre-meeting summary, which Bonanno says can serve as an instant "prep deck”.
Communify's AI-powered Client Stories remove the heavy lift from client meeting preparations and immediately sharpens the advisor's understanding of the client's situation. This feature unifies all disparate data into a single, advisor-ready narrative. It drastically cuts down on meeting prep time by presenting a clear, AI-prioritized view of the client's financial picture, ensuring the advisor walks into every meeting focusing only on the most important elements of the client's investment journey.
2. Client Investment Data and Knowledge Retrieval
In too many organizations, operational efficiency is often stalled by the challenge of quickly finding current, accurate information buried in siloed data and documents.
For example, when a service agent needs to know the exact protocol for wiring funds to a specific global region or how to process a death benefit in a certain country, waiting on a colleague or sifting through a disorganized archive is not a viable option.
The solution, as Mr. Bonanno explains, is implementing Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) models, which effectively puts a large language model on top of a firm's internal documents, restricting the knowledge base to prevent hallucination.
Similarly at Communify, our platform leverages Knowledge Bases as the foundation for MIND AI, which leverages controlled sets of validated data to deliver both deterministic and probabilistic AI results. The platform performs similar functions: instantly go through complex, disparate data and provide actionable insights and next steps. This dramatically reduces client response times while expediting and simplifying the entire communication process.
3. Hyper-Personalized Client Communication and Portfolio Monitoring
A single financial advisor managing hundreds of clients, each with multiple accounts, cannot possibly track every relevant data point. This could be a bond maturing, a birthday, a stock downgrade, or a price target change.
This creates the very real pain point where client experience suffers from a lack of tailored, proactive communication. In the current market, reactive is simply not good enough.
Mr. Bonanno describes the AI solution as the ability to "distill that and... say even in rank order one two three" to then craft a tailored message, giving the client the most accurate and relevant information they need to know about their portfolio.
This level of detail is exactly where Communify's Stories feature shines, analyzing real-time portfolio events and external market data to flag high-priority outreach opportunities for the advisor.
Additionally, advisors can use Financial Chat to quickly analyze entire books of business, generate client-specific insights and proactively communicate market developments relevant to client portfolios.
4. Enhanced Compliance and Risk Mitigation
Managing regulatory compliance and proactively mitigating risk is a time-consuming administrative burden that can expose firms to costly errors.
A concrete pain point involves the manual review of daily transactions, communications, and new client documentation (Know Your Customer – KYC / Anti-Money Laundering - AML), where the sheer volume makes human error inevitable and compliance risks distressingly high.
AI-powered systems are the answer, especially when implementing a hybrid approach. They use Natural Language Processing (NLP) to scan and analyze vast quantities of data, from trade settlements to call transcripts, all in real-time. Through the Communify platform, wealth managers gain the ability to analyze client, portfolio, and conversation sentiment data, which transforms KYC into a continuous, data-driven compliance advantage.
With Communify, every insight is governed by our proprietary P.O.D. framework. This proprietary hybrid approach utilizes deterministic AI for absolute accuracy and compliance, ensuring every piece of data is trustworthy, auditable, and relevant. It’s the difference between guessing on compliance and guaranteeing it.
Wealth Managers: Seize the Competitive Edge with AI
The conversation around AI is no longer if, but how quickly firms can put these proven AI uses in wealth management into practice.
The firms that succeed will be those that prioritize advisor productivity and hyper-personalization for the end client.
And by strategically integrating AI into core workflows, from knowledge retrieval to pre-meeting preparation and proactive outreach, wealth managers can deliver an exceptional client experience that can be scaled and facilitate firm growth.
The time to move from recognition to execution is now. Contact Communify today to schedule a demo and begin your journey to effectively grow your firm, retain clients and scale the advisor.
