During major market sell-offs, financial advisers have to grind to make sure their clients remain calm and don’t sell their stocks in a panic.
It often requires hours on the phone with clients and blast emails aimed at quelling their anxieties about how a downturn could impact their overall financial picture. As technology continues to transform Wall Street, this handholding has been viewed as one of the safest from automation.
At Morgan Stanley, however, robots are being used to support human advisers with these types of tasks, said Andy Saperstein, co-head of the New York-based bank’s wealth management unit.
Saperstein, speaking at the Deutsche Bank Global Financial Services conference on Tuesday, said Morgan Stanley is leveraging artificial intelligence to generate customized emails for its 16,000 financial advisers to send to clients when the markets go berserk.
In addition to giving the firm’s perspective of the market, those emails will show how a major event, like Brexit, might impact a client’s overall portfolio.
“It solves a big problem when clients call up really worried,” Saperstein said.
The technology is intended to take over rote tasks for financial advisers and free them up to focus on more sophisticated client needs — not to replace flesh and blood advisers, bank executives have said.
What’s striking, however, is that the robots will add their own personal touch to the financial advisers’ emails. Gleaning information from a client’s social media and other public sources, emails would also be tailored to include personal details to make them appear more human-like.
“It could say something like “I just noticed that you joined the board of Safe Horizon, wonderful organization, congratulations on that,'” Saperstein said.
“And it appears that the FA took the time to research the effect that day had on every client in their book specifically, because in essence they did, aided by technology.”
Shares of Morgan Stanley closed down 6% on Tuesday amid a broader sell-off in financial stocks after Saperstein said conditions for the wealth business would be more challenging during the second quarter.
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