The latest technology news in the wealth management sector from around the world.

OCBC
OCBC said yesterday that it has launched a skills training programme for its cohort of around 900 advisors in Singapore on the use of generative AI. 

Supporting the group’s “whole-of-wealth” proposition under The Next Frontier strategy, the six-month programme deploys Gen AI to coach wealth advisors on AI competencies including investment advisory, client management, product mastery and wealth planning.

The rollout of such a programme by OCBC – parent of Bank of Singapore – highlights the ways in which AI continues to affect banking and wealth management.

Explaining the rationale for the programme, OCBC said that in the past, wealth advisors could take up to three weeks to get a training session with a supervisor who typically must coach up to 10 staff. “This is in addition to having other responsibilities, resulted in inconsistent evaluation standards and feedback quality across different supervisors,” the bank said.

The programme was developed over 12 months using large language models guided by OCBC’s anonymised proprietary insights on customer behaviours to generate realistic training scenarios. 

Left to right: Jared Yong, deputy cluster manager, Ng Zuolin, OCBC wealth advisor and Bob Ng, OCBC’s head of personal and premier banking, Singapore, presenting at the media launch of the Gen AI training programme yesterday. 

SimCorp
SimCorp, the fintech that is a subsidiary of Germany’s Deutsche Börse, said yesterday that it has introduced a new AI-powered stress testing capability within Axioma Risk. The service enables investment managers to focus on insights and decision-making for their portfolios instead of spending time and effort on manually governing portfolios.

The offering uses natural language for stress testing, a tool used by portfolio and risk managers to understand how their investment portfolios may perform under extreme but plausible market conditions. 

At a time when geopolitical and other events have roiled markets, this is an example of how AI could help wealth managers to manage portfolios more effectively. The SimCorp offering is an example of the kind of use cases proliferating in AI. 

“Accelerating stress testing workflows can be a game changer for investment teams,” Ian Lumb, head of risk and performance product management at SimCorp, said. “When stress test configuration takes hours, risk teams cannot respond to events in real time. We are removing that bottleneck with AI-powered stress testing.”