For decades, banks built their wealth management business on knowing more than their clients. According to fincite, that advantage has already slipped away, and the industry is asking the wrong questions about what comes next.
Friedhelm Schmitt, co-founder and CEO of fincite, argues that the debate around AI in wealth management is fixated on tools, automation and efficiency, when the real issue is what banks’ business is actually built on. fincite, part of the Harvest Group, develops fincite • cios, a modular WealthTech platform used by more than 9,000 wealth managers across Europe.
The information asymmetry that underpinned the traditional advisory relationship is eroding fast. With OpenAI embedding financial functions into ChatGPT and Anthropic pushing its models into corporate finance, understanding the client is no longer exclusive to the bank. fincite notes that intermediaries inserting themselves between provider and customer is nothing new, pointing to Booking in travel, Amazon in retail and comparison portals such as C24 in banking. What is new is a system capable of grasping a person’s financial situation more comprehensively than a bank currently can.
Part of the problem, fincite argues, is how crudely banks profile their clients. Age, risk class and investment horizon remain the default categories, treating risk tolerance as a fixed trait rather than a snapshot. AI, by contrast, can assess a person’s life stage, spot changing circumstances and even flag when someone is about to act against their own interests. Wealth managers who position themselves as platforms, accompanying clients across their entire wealth rather than filing them into annual templates, are the ones fincite expects to prevail.
Schmitt sets out three layers of the AI-era banking stack: data aggregation, business applications and AI, and regulatory compliance. The compliance layer, he stresses, must stay under banks’ own control, since it alone keeps everything above it auditable and regulatorily sound. Yet few institutions are preparing for AI’s next phase, where advisory systems execute recommendations autonomously and actively manage portfolios.
fincite also warns that Europe squandered a strategic opportunity with Open Banking, slowing rather than accelerating the opening of financial data. Bank-operated wealth aggregation, it argues, is the first concrete step to regaining control, keeping sovereignty over access, governance and consent. fincite • cios is built around exactly this layer, API-first and designed to slot into existing core banking systems.
Looking further ahead, fincite sees memory, the ability to store client context over a lifetime, as AI’s next developmental stage, and the point where banks’ static customer snapshots look most vulnerable. Those who fail to build this layer risk becoming pure infrastructure while others own the client relationship.
For more, read the full report here.
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