Dive Brief:
- Merrill Lynch Wealth Management and Bank of America Private Bank — Bank of America’s wealth management businesses — developed AI-Powered Meeting Journey, a product for financial advisors that cuts time spent on client meetings by up to four hours per meeting, the firms shared Thursday.
- AI-Powered Meeting Journey’s tools within the firms’ Salesforce CRM deliver materials to advisors ahead of meetings, provide summaries afterwards and suggest next steps. The combination of tools lets financial advisors spend more time on “strategic planning and deeper client engagement,” according to the press release.
- “As the firm has rolled out these meeting tools, it’s been a pretty transformational part of our practice,” Shane Waarbroek, SVP and wealth management advisor at Merrill Lynch, said during a media briefing on Tuesday. “Each of these tools has allowed us to minimize the amount of busywork we’re doing and allows us to focus on strategy for clients.”
Dive Insight:
Banks have been steadily investing in AI tools to help lighten the load for customer-facing employees. Citigroup in August deployed two AI-powered advisory platforms for its wealth advisory division, giving advisors faster access to market insights and research. Meanwhile, Swiss banking giant UBS is using AI to redesign front and back office processes.
As the wealth management industry faces an advisor shortage amid rising customer expectations, AI has emerged as a wingman for both advisors and customers, said Inez Louzonis, managing director at Merrill Lynch.
The firms’ AI-Powered Meeting Journey represents an evolution to “AI that can take a meaningful step in the process end-to-end,” Louzonis said during Tuesday’s media briefing. It also reflects Bank of America’s ongoing effort to accelerate AI deployment across the enterprise.
“It’s not just advisors that benefit from the power of AI, but our clients,” Louzonis said. “They are facing complexity. There are volatile markets, tax considerations, uncertain macro environments, and they are looking for more advice and more insights. Helping our advisors operate with greater precision, speed and insight also enables us to deliver a higher quality, more consistent client experience.”
AI-Powered Meeting Journey gives advisors different templates to choose from in order to prepare for client meetings, said Paula Hanson, private bank platforms and enablement executive at Bank of America Private Bank. The AI tool then summarizes information from the CRM, giving an overview of the client including financials, interests and previous interactions. It also provides talking points and potential actions for advisors to take during the meeting.
Meeting summarization is provided after client calls, conducted through Zoom video conferencing, which is saved to the client record within the CRM, Hanson said during the media briefing.
“It eliminates that administrative burden of entering that information manually into the system,” Hanson said.
The tool also includes a conversational assistant within the CRM platform that can access information across the system for advisors before, during and after meetings.
“The meeting journey experience becomes a flywheel for accelerating touchpoints with prospects, with clients, saving our team's capacity and allowing them to reinvest that time savings toward growing relationships with our clients,” Hanson said. “We’re really excited about what all of these capabilities as a collective meeting journey experience across our entire client relationship management platform can deliver for us.”
