Ever wondered why digital assistants are so good? It’s all about Natural language processing (NLP) – the science of programming computers to process natural language. It makes robots “more human”. Some serious resources are going into this science. GPT-3 (Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3) is a language model that uses deep learning to produce human-like text. Applying over 175 billion…
Humans are slow and expensive while robots are fast and cheap to operate. Unfortunately, robots can’t read behavioural cues like a human can and pivot immediately with high accuracy. Their algorithms just aren’t there yet. What we need is a cyborg adviser, “enhanced” to do what a robot can do while managing the emotional flow…
Assuming you are one of the 80% of Australians without a financial adviser, where would you go for investment advice? In the old days, the minute the money hit your bank account the branch would swing into gear and the deposit would probably end up in a suite of bank products they hope will help…
Every bank left financial planning in the wake of the Hayne Commission leaving a lot of money on the table to remediate clients for poor financial advice. Have the risk/reward dynamics improved in such a short time to tempt them to return? Deloitte’s Mark Ryan remarked at the Stockbrokers and Financial Advisers Association (SAFAA) Conference…
According to Adviser Ratings, only 12.2 per cent of the population used an adviser in 2019, down from the year before. ASIC wants to know how Australians can find affordable, quality advice and issued Consultation Paper 332 to find out. Firstly, what is affordable advice? ASIC report 224 found on average, consumers believe initial advice…
An adviser needs to know their client, products and the law before giving advice. In theory a Robot can do all of this, much of it more efficiently and all of it cheaper. Theory is becoming reality. Finchat has a voice based financial health check. Quotacy has a voiced-based Life Insurance quotation system and investment…
At the peak of tulip mania, in February 1637, some tulip bulbs sold for more than 10 times the annual income of a skilled artisan. Some have theorized that outbreaks of bubonic plague throughout the period caused folks to take chances they would not have ordinarily taken. Sound familiar? During the current pandemic stock markets,…
The real future of financial advice – Rise of the Robots I attended an Amazon conference where the key note speaker declared (somewhat tongue in cheek) that “in the future all companies will be IT companies”. He pointed to Uber and Airbnb who are not much more than a computer program and the market capitalization…
Apple, Amazon, Microsoft and Google have a combined market capitalisation bigger than the GDP of most countries. If they believe “voice” is the future then it probably is. Most of us use their digital assistants. We ask Apple’s Siri to call mum, Amazon’s Alexa to turn on the lights, Microsoft’s Cortana for the day’s schedule…
Financial planners have used algorithms for ages. Financial planning software churns out advice documents, re-balancing algorithms keep asset mixes aligned to risk profiles and research software forms the basis of product recommendations. Why can’t we let clients access the software directly and reduce costs? Planning software is difficult to use and understand. Even financial planners…