“The most important planning outcomes for my clients cannot be replicated by an algorithm,” one planner is reported as saying.
And the Wall Street Journal is reported as saying, “Artificial intelligence should enable human advisors to spend more time at what they excel at—understanding the personal aspects of their clients’ financial lives and building a bond of trust.”
In fact, automation can be a distinct boon for those who are young or do not have enough money to work with a planner regularly. And also those who naturally want to do more work on their own. As fintech evolves, there will be more places where it can be applied, thus providing better services to the industry.
Who is eligible for fintech services will evolve as well. Nonetheless, fintech is never something to be used instead of personal financial planning but as an addition to it.
Automated advice may not give the kind of holistic advice that will tie together the different parts of a person’s full planning needs. But nonetheless, fintech will be ever more important to the ways that customers perceive their planners.
“People in the planning industry, like others, need time to come to grips with what’s occurring and time to fully adopt it,” says Tim Lea, author of Down the Rabbit Hole, an introductory book about blockchain. “The full strength of what is to come has not even been scratched yet.”
Financial planners are cautiously optimistic about fintech, but they don’t want it to move too fast. Regulation may be important to slow down destabilizing fintech applications that would otherwise cause problems if made too rapidly.
In fact, professionals believe that the evolution of fintech may be difficult for regulators to confront. Regulators and legislators have to closely monitor the advisory situation. Cloud computing is also becoming more popular and security will become a bigger issue as a result.
Over at ThinkAdvisor.com in an article entitled, “The Bitcoin Blockchain Won’t Transform Financial Services,” we find private and public legers may not make significant changes right away. In fact, this corresponds to what others are saying.
In the near term, the impact of blockchain and cryptocurrencies will be less than expected. Only in the longer term will it have more of an impact—and that impact will be greater than expected.