Claude for Advisors hints at a bigger problem than just meeting prep

The recent launch of Claude for Financial Advisors confirms to the market what financial advisers already know: advice is ripe for digital disruption. The profession’s reliance on a multitude of legacy systems makes the process of delivering advice inefficient and expensive.

AI and new technologies will fundamentally change how advice businesses operate and how clients engage with them.

While Claude for Financial Advisors is designed for Registered Investment Advisors (RIA) in the United States and initially gathers data from ten launch partners of which only a handful operate in Australia, the fact that Anthropic has built an AI assistant specifically to help advisers with data management and analysis highlights the very real challenges facing advice professionals globally.

(It also raises the question, what does Big AI actually want from the financial advice and wealth management sector?)

It the US, advisers estimate that they spend around 20 per cent of their day on administrative tasks and another 30 per cent preparing for client meetings. 

Similarly, in Australia, advisers spend around six hours a week, or just over an hour a day, on “follow up” including chasing clients and service providers for information.

While administration is part of running a business, no one can argue that advisers waste too much time on low value administrative tasks, which takes them away from the meaningful work that clients’ value and will change their lives.

Connector, not replacement

Claude for Financial Advisors might be a valuable tool for some RIAs but it’s not the saviour that advisers have been waiting for. 

It is effectively a set of Model Context Protocol (MCP) connectors that feed into the software, tools and data sources that US advisers commonly use. 

The pitch is that advisers can pull data straight from Claude and query it. They can effectively get everything they need from one place, reducing the amount of time spent on administration, accelerating the delivery of advice and increasing their capacity to grow their business and help more clients.

But Claude for Financial Advisors does not solve the problems facing advisers, it just brings them together.

It connects software and applications, but it does not replace them. Similarly, data aggregation platforms that leverage AI and automation to gather, analyse and organise data aren’t the solution.

In short, they use AI to glue broken systems together. Advisers can search and query multiple systems from one screen, as opposed to having a dozen tabs open and pulling information together. They can move between systems quickly, but the underlying problem still exists. 

Beneath a beautiful home screen are dozens of independent systems that need to be managed. Every custodian, CRM and planning tool is still running underneath, and every vendor is still getting paid, as before.

Claude doesn’t close any of the tabs, it just changes who’s doing the tabbing.

Furthermore, no matter how innovative a technology platform is, any insights and recommendations generated will only be as accurate and useful as the underlying data. Documents are drafted but not verified before they land on an adviser’s desk.

Advisers are ultimately responsible for checking information and identifying any errors. If inconsistent data exists in three different systems, the onus is on the adviser to catch mistakes. 

For advisers who already don’t want the administration burden of booking meetings and documenting file notes, the idea of spending their evenings checking for errors and contacting service providers and platforms to correct client information sounds like more work.

It’s actually a different job entirely and a risky one too.

Advisers need an experienced partner to manage their systems and data, and build AI workflows. They don’t need another tool to configure; they need a complete solution and real support behind it.

Costs add up fast

When using AI assistants, trust and security are critical factors but cost is another important consideration.

For example, Claude for Financial Advisors has the same subscription model as Claude. In addition to a flat fee per user per month, usage is priced per token. Using it across multiple underlying systems every day is going to churn through a lot of tokens. 

It is still unclear how much Claude for Financial Advisors will cost to use at scale, but these costs will be on top of what advice businesses already pay for the underlying software and solutions they operate. 

There are also question marks about Personally Identifiable Information (PII) because every connector is another door into a household’s data. Claude has not provided any clarity around how data gets kept and for how long.

These are not minor issues. Data privacy and cyber security are major concerns for individuals, companies and regulators. 

While Anthropic launched Claude for Financial Advisors at the world’s largest advice conference, Future Proof, amidst much fanfare and hype, the profession’s reaction has been more curiosity than eagerness to adopt it. Advisers in general are a sceptical bunch and there is still a lot of distrust and concern around the safe and effective use of AI, after all trust is what the advice profession is built on. 

Hardy Michel is the co-founder of Marloo.