Interview with Davyde Wachell, founder and CEO of Responsive AI
Davyde Wachell, founder and CEO of Responsive AI, a financial platform powered by artificial intelligence, believes the future of wealth management is in providing truly customized and powerful advice.
Why provide advice and keep a strong focus?
Quality advice should be widely accessible. To excel in traditional methods of serving clients in this space, companies should have true know-how. These methods, however, are commonly limited to selling portfolio products.
“I think it’s possible to bring great advice that’s given on a mass scale—advice that’s personalized, intelligent, tactical, and strategic, not just selling portfolio products,” Wachell says.
The statement above means that a great deal of work lies ahead for wealthtech companies. However, limited resources force companies to ask themselves how they can save effort and what they can do without. Companies need to work out priorities so they do not waste resources on secondary activities.
“It’s questions like, 'What do we get rid of?' 'What do we ignore?' 'What do we focus on?'" Wachell explains. “How can we get rid of the jargon, the layers of abstraction, the different roles, and just provide a unified advice model that is affordable and makes sense for end clients? This is crucial because automation and machine learning are going to make redundant and irrelevant a lot of functions in investment management.”
Wachell says much discussion currently revolves around the importance of a client’s experience, but people’s opinions differ about what enhancing this experience entails. In his opinion, it’s nothing more complicated than dumping old methods and unnecessary functions and empowering clients with new tech.
“They’re talking about client-focused experience, but what that really means is you have to let go of the old ways and the things that don’t matter and use technologies that would help you in improving the experience," Wachell says.
He thinks it’s important to prune the tree of investment management and wealth management to really focus on delivering advice, and he believes different value providers will be involved in that process. Wachell is sure that alpha, planning and accounting providers will be involved, and he believes that some life coaching and career planning advisors might be involved because, after all, how you spend your money is how you spend your time.