AI News From Altruist, Morningstar and Microsoft
It has already been a busy week with advisor-related artificial intelligence announcements.
First, custodian Altruist touted the real-time data connectivity that Hazel, its internal AI platform, now has access to and can deliver to advisors and clients through queries.
The firm acquired the AI-powered productivity platform Thyme in June. It promptly rebranded it as Hazel, beginning the customization process to create an AI assistant tailored for the firm’s independent advisors and end clients.
It can now deliver real-time answers to questions about everything from balances and other account data to beneficiary or household information or holdings.
These real-time data features are in addition to Hazel’s ability to answer questions whose answers are based on data pulled from an advisor’s CRM, documents, emails and meeting notes, which Altruist announced in September.
“For RIAs, the custodian is that ultimate system of record, where critical details like beneficiaries, cost basis and RMD data actually live. By wiring our Altruist data directly into Hazel, we’re setting the standard for what AI in wealth management should be—fast, accurate and truly actionable. We’re out front today, and we’ll extend that lead with additional custodian integrations and, next, the ability to initiate actions directly on Altruist from within Hazel,” said CEO Jason Wenk in a statement.
Altruist said it would build additional real-time data integration into other advisor workflows, including meeting prep and email generation by year’s end.
Hazel AI is also available to advisors who do not custody assets with Altruist as a standalone product for $60 per seat per month.
In addition to Hazel, Altruist also announced a rebrand in June and rolled out its own internally built cash management platform in December.
Morningstar, Microsoft Team Up on AI Data Access
Advisors working for firms that heavily rely on both Microsoft and that are licensed users of Morningstar data could soon find themselves able to perform advanced searches, analytics and research based on the latter’s data from within their own work environment.
This week, the two companies made joint announcements from the stage at the annual Microsoft Ignite conference, a gathering for developers, IT professionals and partners.
The event explores new technologies and integrations, and provides an in-person venue for Microsoft and other firms to share strategic plans, development roadmaps and demonstrate their solutions, as well as facilitate networking.
Advisory firms that rely on both Microsoft Foundry (formerly Azure AI Foundry and Azure AI Studio), which is a unified, enterprise-grade platform-as-a-service on the Microsoft Azure platform for building, deploying, optimizing and governing AI applications and intelligent agents, and that also have licensed access to Morningstar data, will be able to integrate the latter’s data into their iteration of Azure.
In simplest terms, Foundry is designed to enable developers, data scientists and IT professionals working for larger advisory or enterprise firms to quickly and securely build out AI projects, taking them from the prototype stage into production.
This means that further downstream, those advisory or enterprise firms can, in turn, use Microsoft Copilot Studio to build AI agents internally that are powered with Morningstar’s data and research.
In the coming months, the firms will enable Microsoft 365 Copilot to also take advantage of the Morningstar data from within an advisor’s desktop productivity tools, such as Teams, which is provided as an example.
This is designed to provide advisors and institutional investors with AI-powered insights, enabling them to serve clients more efficiently and facilitating the development of custom AI workflows for compliance, risk and strategy purposes within their firms.
Zocks And RightCapital Are Now Integrated
The popular AI notetaker and assistant Zocks announced a direct integration with financial planning platform RightCapital.
This integration is designed to reduce the amount of manual data entry required for creating financial plans by connecting personal and financial details recorded in client conversations and emails with Zocks, and then populating up to 200 fields in RightCapital.
Advisors can sign up for a live webinar demonstrating the integration on Dec. 3.
Both firms have been busy developing integrations of late, with Orion and Zocks rolling out a bidirectional data integration in September, and Zocks and Holistiplan announcing an integration and strategic partnership in October.Zock’s competitor, Jump, announced a similar integration with RightCapital in June.
WealthLine Announces WealthReach Prospecting Platform
Another AI-powered prospecting platform called WealthReach has been announced and is currently being piloted with a small group of advisors. This one has been bootstrapped and born from advisory industry insiders.
Some might find the current naming scheme unfortunate, given that each starts with the word “wealth” (considering the numerous other entities that use the word, which predate it, from this very publication to other AI products for advisors, such as Wealth Management GPT, for example).
Called WealthLine.AI, which is also the name of the company’s flagship AI-driven receptionist, the platform also includes WealthChat (a website chatbot), WealthGPT (an AI assistant that can tap into and answer advisors’ questions about their firm), and the yet to be released WealthMail, an AI-powered email assistant.
Co-founded by Michael Barrasso and David DeCelle, WealthLine is intended for firms struggling with organic growth and is meant to help them take warm leads and turn them hot and convert them to clients, which sounds similar to the mission of the popular and award-winning competitor Catchlight’s mission.
Barrasso heads up business development for the fee-only United Financial Planning, and DeCelle is CEO of Model FA, an advisory business consultancy, in addition to their roles as co-founders of the startup.
Specifically, WealthReach combines website visitor identification with off-site intent data and AI-generated outreach sequences, according to its founders.
Second in numbers of competitors only to what are referred to as AI notetaking applications or platforms, the advisor prospecting and lead generation sector has seen a new crop of AI-powered platforms and tools in the last few years, from Catchlight, to Cashmere, WealthFeed, FINNY and Aidentified, among others.