BofA Merrill Launches AI-Powered Meeting Journey Tool
Arriving a couple years behind what many RIAs, large and small, have rolled out to their advisors, Merrill Wealth Management and Bank of America Private Bank have announced what they are calling their artificial intelligence-powered Meeting Journey, an integrated suite of technology meant to help advisors prepare for, conduct and follow up on client meetings.
According to the company, the new tools can save advisors up to four hours per meeting in efficiency gains over manual processing of notes, moving data between systems and creating follow-up correspondence or summaries with clients.
The new technology features intelligent workflow tools that deliver meeting prep materials, summaries and actionable next steps, expanding the firm’s suite of tech-enabled workflows as Bank of America accelerates its enterprise-wide deployment of AI.
The tool includes three core capabilities: Meeting Prep, which searches and consolidates client relationship insights and recent activity into prep materials; Meeting Summarization, which acts as an AI notetaker during virtual meetings with client consent; and Meeting Follow-Up, which summarizes meeting decisions and generates tasks and documentation.
Rather than turn to one of the AI-notetaking platforms that have grown in popularity with many RIA firms, including Jump, Zocks, GReminders, or Zeplyn for example, Bank of America Merrill turned to enterprise partners Salesforce and Zoom.
An online demonstration showing various aspects of the new set of tools, customized from each provider for BofA/Merrill, gave an indication of how that workflow would be initiated, used and interacted with from within the CRM (Salesforce Financial Services Cloud) or the Zoom virtual meeting technology interfaces and other parts of the firm’s interface.
To be sure, BofA Merrill has invested significantly in digital tools for years, having launched, for example, its Digital Wealth Overview, three- to four-minute-long personalized interactive video presentations for clients narrated by the firm’s AI-driven virtual assistant Erica, in 2020. There have been several others, including its personal wealth analysis rollout, which combined financial planning and portfolio analysis processes in ways that were the envy of other firms, as well as its fully digital onboarding.
Meeting Journey, however, has seen the fastest rate of adoption and usage among the more than 1,500 advisors who used it in beta of any tool the firm has rolled out in recent years, according to Inez Louzonis, Merrill’s head of platforms and capabilities.
Bank of America invests $13.5 billion annually on technology, with $4 billion dedicated to new initiatives such as AI, she said.
While BofA Merrill has relied on its partners for much of the underlying AI technology, a lot of customization work had gone on internally.
“This is fully configured and customized to the workflows and needs of our advisors and how they work,” said Louzonis.