The robo-advisor could go the way of the rotary phone, replaced by the AI advisor.

That’s the hope of tech startup ForwardLane, which is combining artificial intelligence with quantitative investing models and financial planning to create a new spin on digital wealth management platforms.

Through AI powered by IBM Watson, ForwardLane, based in New York, aims to provide advisors with the kind of in-depth quantitative modeling, real-time responses and highly personalized investment advice once only available to the upper echelons of investors, says Nathan Stevenson, founder and CEO.

“Forward Lane unites individual clients with institutional risk elements,” Stevenson says. “Much of this technology is already used by hedge funds, large banks and sovereign wealth funds. We take this ‘Formula One’ technology and put it into the hands of advisors so they can replicate a large part of the experience that an ultra-high net worth investor would be getting.”

Stevenson envisions artificial intelligence allowing advisors to reduce costs by up to 40 percent, increase their client service capabilities threefold and triple their customer satisfaction ratings.

Earlier this year, ForwardLane unveiled its software which includes an advisor dashboard, compliance functionality, investment management, client conversation and financial intelligence functions using deep learning, an AI concept where computers record, analyze and prioritize information using algorithms.

“The artificial intelligence effectively reads so you don’t have to,” Stevenson says. “ForwardLane is using deep learning to go really deep into research. Having a machine to do all the heavy lifting allows advisors to have the highest quality of information at their fingertips without having to sort through the mass of data and variables.”

In addition to Stevenson, an entrepreneur who formerly led technology projects for CQS, BNP Paribas London and the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, the team behind ForwardLane consists of wealth managers, quants, software engineers and developers.

AI allows ForwardLane to deliver advice incorporating a large array of variables -- from current market data to global political events to a firm’s investment principles to the client’s risk tolerance -- directly to the advisor in real time.

Most notably, ForwardLane can synthesize the multiverse of financial information into talking points personalized to the client that the advisor can use in conversations.

“AI comes in through the simple experience of distinguishing what’s going on in the world,” Stevenson says. “We have news, beta fundamentals, earnings estimates, external research, and we synthesize that and bring it into an easy-to-read snapshot giving you a view of what’s happening in the markets, and simplifying it for delivery to the clients.”

The AI allows the tool to go a step further -- each time ForwardLane is engaged, the system learns and remembers which pieces of information are the most useful to the advisor and the client, allowing it to more easily gather and deliver data the next time it is used.

ForwardLane has a number of applications, including the synthesis of insurance instrument filings and other product documents for a conversation tool to be used for wholesale distribution, addressing the reporting requirements in the Department of Labor’s fiduciary rule and coordinating bespoke firm intelligence and fixed income manager data for sales question-and-answer platforms.

Stevenson hopes the tool will help advisors provide a higher level of advice to existing clients, and to scale their firms to serve a larger cross section of the investing public.

“Now our true focus is on the second tier of financial advisors, we want to help them with cognitive technology,” Stevenson says. “Ultimately, they’re the people who cna most benefit from ForwardLane by becoming more productive, covering more clients, and providing more services to existing clients.”

ForwardLane is currently engaged with ten banks across three continents, partnered with Thomson Reuters and Morningstar, and is reaching out to other analysts, banks and wealth managers.

Like the older generation of digital wealth management platforms, ForwardLane is designed with hopes of being a disruptor. Yet Stevenson, himself a quant, says it’s meant to complement and enhance the existing roles of investment researchers, not to replace them.

“This is where it gets really interesting, because it doesn’t eliminate the jobs of quants and product specialists, it scales their capabilities,” Stevenson says. “ForwardLane takes their intelligence and makes it more valuable because it’s scalable to more people. It’s reducing time to market for those insights. If the information’s time to market is cut down, it can give the entire firm a competitive advantage, you end up with more productive researchers and quants.”

But will standard roboadvisors, once thought to threaten the well-being of the financial advice industry, really have to make way for a new generation of AI-powered products?

Maybe not, says Stevenson.

"Because it's using AI, ForwardLane is something more than your standard roboadvisor," Stevenson says. "Roboadvisors have done well to provide service to the bottom end of the wealth management market at low costs, but there's still a wide gap between the mass affluent and ultra-high net worth or institutional investors. AI is going to help us close that gap."