The debate around AI in wealth management usually revolves around tools, automation and efficiency. But according to fincite co-founder and CEO Friedhelm Schmitt, this misses the point entirely.
The real question is not which tools banks deploy, but what their business model actually rests on, and that foundation has already shifted.
For decades, banks profited from an information asymmetry: they understood markets, products and financial contexts better than their clients. That gap created the value of advice. Now, with OpenAI embedding financial functions into ChatGPT and Anthropic pushing its models into corporate finance departments, fincite argues the traditional banking relationship is beginning to wobble.
Intermediaries wedging themselves between provider and customer is nothing new, as Booking, Amazon and comparison portals such as C24 demonstrate. What is new, fincite stresses, is that for the first time a system can capture an individual’s financial situation more comprehensively than a bank does. The threat is not displacement, it is that understanding the client is no longer exclusive to the bank.
Banks still categorise clients in a remarkably coarse-grained way, by age, risk class and investment horizon, treating risk tolerance as a permanent trait rather than a snapshot. AI, by contrast, can holistically grasp a person’s life phase, detect changes in circumstance and flag when someone is about to act against their own interests. fincite believes wealth managers who position themselves as platforms, accompanying clients across their entire wealth and intervening situationally, will prevail.
fincite identifies three layers in the AI-era banking stack: data aggregation as the foundation, business applications and AI generating utility, and a regulatory and compliance layer that banks must control themselves to keep everything auditable and regulatorily sound. The next step, it warns, is AI that acts, executing recommendations and actively managing portfolios, and very few institutions are ready.
Europe, fincite argues, squandered a strategic opportunity with Open Banking, but data aggregation is coming regardless. Bank-operated wealth aggregation is the first concrete step, keeping sovereignty over access, permissions and consent. Those who surrender it risk becoming pure infrastructure while others own the client relationship.
The most far-reaching shift is memory: AI systems that store context across a client’s lifetime. A bank’s static picture of income and marital status cannot compete. Building a lifecycle context layer, fincite concludes, is what makes truly individualised advice possible, and the technology is ready. The decision now sits with the banks.
fincite, part of the Harvest Group, develops fincite • cios, a modular WealthTech platform used by more than 9,000 wealth managers across Europe.
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