Most people know I was an advisor before choosing to create a messaging tool built specifically for advisors. It’s this perspective that I use each and every day when it comes to updates to the MyRepChat system. I take my experience very seriously and this notion of AI scanning and scrolling our text messages is concerning.
Financial Professionals take their relationships with their clients very serious, as they should. What has always intrigued me is when broker dealers and banks forget how important this relationship is and do things that suggest that they can simply plug and play anyone into the advisor chair and the client will never notice. This is not the case, at least not if the relationship is as solid as it should be.
I’ve been asked over the years, since starting MyRepChat, what does MyRepChat do with this data and the answer is always very simple. We do nothing with it, other than what you tell us to do. We don’t share the contents of your communication with anyone, we don’t look through it, heck we can’t even access it without your permission. This is not our data to play with; we are simply a conduit for communication, and best of all, one that keeps you in line with the regulators.
Orion, not too long ago, acquired Redtail and by extension, Redtail Speak. I’ve heard rumors of Redtail pushing to mine data and now those rumors are reality.
https://www.investmentnews.com/orion-reveals-chatgpt-integration-at-ascent-conference-234470
Why does this matter, read the second paragraph again. The role of a true Financial Professional is so much more than portfolio analytics and rate of return. In fact, year after year, performance always lags communication when it comes to clients choosing their advisor. Consider what a Financial Professional must deal with each day to stay in business. Here’s a short list:
- Regulations like Reg BI
- Government entities tell your clients repeatedly that you make decisions that are not in their best interest; now their going to step in to help.
- Market volatility
- Explain to me how to make sense of the stock market over the past 5 years; now explain it to a client who gets their intuition from their favorite news outlet.
- Inflation
- What’s a dollar truly worth and what will it be worth for your client at retirement?
- Robo Advisors
- Imagine the same companies you partner with to do business openly creating products to compete with you.
- Taxes
- This goes beyond helping clients understand how they should plan for the never changing tax policies, this also includes the guilt and financial repercussions you MUST feel as a result of working hard and being one of the select few who start this profession to actually make it.
Orion now can scan every text message you send or receive through Redtail Speak and will now begin making suggestions. The real question is, what else will they do with this data and who will they share it with? Orion has a vast portfolio of products, partners, and “3rd parties” for which they can share this information with. Baked somewhere in their legal documents, I can only assume they have permission to do this and by extension of you choosing their product, you are granting them that permission.
I could go on and on about this topic, but in the end it’s very simple – MyRepChat will never do this and as a former advisor and registered principal, I have some serious concerns over anyone who would consent to this approach.