Osaic CEO: New Advisor Tech Tools 'Will Blow Your Mind'

Those changes will be enabled further by powerful new tools for advisors, some of which “will blow your mind,” he says in the interview.

At Osaic’s future-themed NXT conference in May, the large wealth management company featured time-saving productivity tools for FAs, such as Jump AI and Zocks. Price explains both in the interview.

He joined the industry in 1983 as an EF Hutton trainee and rose to be president and COO of Prudential Securities and UBS head of wealth management advisor group - Americas.

Here are excerpts from our conversation:

THINKADVISOR: When will AI be able to perform the higher-level work of advisors, like stock picking?

JAMIE PRICE: It’s going to come faster than you think. The one thing that a bot can’t do today is emotionally connect to the end client, or if you’re running a portfolio and think, “I don’t like the market today. I’m going to get out.”

Those are human emotions deciding what to do. But if you’re running money algorithmically and, say, markets go down 10%, and you usually take out cash and buy [in that situation], you can set up those rules and do it today.

How so?

Recently, a friend dumped [handicapping] data into ChatGPT, and it predicted the horse races for him. He hit about 50% of the horses in a race.

If he kept plugging important stuff into an algorithm, eventually that engine would know exactly what the most important things are and select the horses for him. No different from stock picking.

What’s your take on the explosive use of high tech in financial services? 

We’re witnessing the Fourth Industrial Revolution in the world. And it will drive a lot of change for our industry, much of that having to do with productivity tools.

Why are those critical?

We need to solve a problem: According to Cerulli and McKinsey [research firms], the roughly 340,000 registered advisors in the U.S. today is going to go down to about 280,000 over the next 10 years.

Yet the amount of private wealth in this country will grow by almost double digits.

We’ll have more money being managed and advised on by fewer advisors.

Today, about 40% of an advisor’s job is what I call “administrivia,” not related to advising the client. That includes paperwork done with digital straight-through processing, compliance regulations, taking notes when in a client meeting and transcribing or typing them into their CRM.

But advisors will be doing none of that.

Why not?

With the ability to leverage AI for portfolio management, productivity tools, and for iterative AI to do administrative tasks that are very time-consuming, advisors will be able to spend way more time advising clients vs. working on administration.

It used to be that independent BDs weren’t particularly forward-thinking and tech-minded. What changed their attitude?

That’s absolutely true. When I got into the industry more than 40 years ago, product manufacturers would, for example, create a variable annuity but had to have a BD to legally launch it.

So the BD was used to distribute product. That is not how wealth managers work today. They’re thinking about holistic financial planning. The industry has significantly matured.

What helped bring that about?

We had a big productivity boost with cellular and digital. Now there’s AI, generative AI and robotics combined with computer power and data analytics. That’s a significant confluence of [developments].

To what degree is Osaic concentrating on productivity tools?

We’ve been focused on building an architecture capability that can plug and play those tools because so much client money is expected [to be invested].

The opportunity is that advisors will be able to handle more money and that the next gen [advisors] will take over, but now we don’t have enough advisors.

Wealth will grow and change hands. How are advisors going to continue to handle larger sums of wealth from clients and be able to run their practice more efficiently?

That’s where I see the biggest application of generative AI. There will be tools coming along over the next five years that you can’t even fathom.

Please elaborate.

Future innovation is going to be driven by technology and leveraging the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

Most of the productivity tools are going to change rapidly. Some of the things that have been shown to me will blow your mind.

Such as?

We’re looking at a financial planning tool that doesn’t require you to enter anything. It’s all done by voice in the conversation with the client, including complete cash flow, estate planning [and so on]. No data is entered unless you want to change what was spoken.

It's being used right now by people in another country. We’re actively looking at it to see if it’s something we should be plugging into our system and playing.

What are some of the most significant productivity tools you highlighted at your May NXT event in Las Vegas that offer FAs solutions?

Jump AI, which allows you to do meeting transcriptions. It has broad application for what used to be taking notes in a client meeting and then plugging that stuff into an app, a CRM or a financial planning tool.

Fast forward: Advisors in a client meeting aren’t going to be doing any of that. It will all be done for them. Jump is an application we put right on our platform. Numerous advisors are already using it.

What’s another new tool you featured?

Zocks, which is a compliance assistance tool. Some of the things it does relate to regulatory compliance, which today takes advisors an enormous amount of time.

Zocks is a rules-based engine that does compliance reconciliation. It has robotic capability with natural language capability. It’s AI-driven and has a robotic back end.

Broadly, what are your expectations for growth or shrinkage in advisor channels?

You’ll see a complete consolidation in the RIA space. It’s happening in the BD space. It happened with the wirehouses.

What’s going to emerge are scaled wealth firms that can be flexible enough to allow advisors to affiliate as a fee-only, a 1099, in a partnership or an employee model, an RIA or a hybrid.

And having a new architectural [tech] capability to plug and play will probably be one of the best opportunities this industry has ever seen.

It will create time and efficiency for the home office, the advisor and ultimately for the end customer.