AI moves into the advice process

Financial advisers could soon spend less time piecing together clients' histories and more time acting on them, as Marloo launches an artificial intelligence (AI) tool that searches entire client books alongside new research showing consumers are increasingly willing to let AI help make financial decisions.

Marloo co-founder Hardy Michel said using its new Ask Marloo feature can "gain an immediate understanding of clients, including clients they haven't met yet," while receiving updates on activity, potential issues and opportunities.

Ask Marloo allows advisers and support staff to query an entire client book and receive answers drawn from meetings, documents, emails and other information held across a business' digital ecosystem.

The platform is designed to give advisers a faster view of clients' financial positions, investments insurance, advice history and outstanding tasks. It can also assist advisers taking on acquired or inherited books by providing client overviews without lengthy handover processes.

Michel said the technology addresses the industry's reliance on advisers' individual knowledge of clients.

"Financial advice currently runs on memory, advisers carry their clients with them, remembering what they said three years ago, what's truly important to them and why they made certain decisions," he said.

"Ask Marloo does work for advisers, it doesn't just record it."

The technology comes as AI increasingly moves into consumers' financial lives, according to Experian's AI in Risk: The Rise of Agentic Commerce, produced with Forrester Consulting.

The report surveyed 6247 digitally literate, credit active consumers across 13 Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) and Asia Pacific (APAC) markets and found large language models are emerging as a "decision support layer" between consumers and financial institutions.

In Australia, 79% trust large language models (LLMs) to compare loans across providers, while 63% are comfortable sharing information such as credit scores and bank statements with an LLM for personalised feedback.

Globally, 85% believe AI agents could compare more options than a person manually, while 84% believe they could help secure better prices or rates.

Experian Australia and New Zealand chief executive Andrew Black said the opportunity was accompanied by a need for greater safeguards.

"Australians surveyed are open to using AI when researching and comparing financial products, with the findings showing clear interest in tools that can save time and make it easier to consider different offers," Black said.

"Banks and lenders now need to give consumers confidence that their information will be protected and that they will remain in control of important decisions."

The report found 76% worry AI-generated responses could contain errors or misleading information, while manipulation by fraudsters, loss of control and making correct decisions were among the leading concerns around AI agents.

For advisers, the emerging use case is less about replacing the relationship and more about making the information underpinning it easier to access.