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Everyone is excited about generative AI.
Not to be left out of the fun, Morningstar CEO Kunal Kapoor introduced the company’s own new stab at getting on the bandwagon during his keynote at their annual conference on Wednesday.
“All of you probably know by now that it took three years for Netflix to hit 1 million users. For Spotify, it took five months. And probably because all of you have been using it, for ChatGPT, it took five days,”
Named “Mo,” the new technology is a mashup of Morningstar’s data and language model run on the OpenAI platform and combined with digital avatar technology from New Zealand company Soul Machines.
As Kapoor explained, a person vocalizes a question (no mere text chatbot), which is converted to text and transmitted to the OpenAI model and analyzed using more than 100,000 Morningstar data points to generate an answer.
A text answer is then converted back to speech for Mo the Avatar to deliver the answer.
“We’re trying to do that within 10 seconds with an answer that the user is likely to trust,” said Kapoor.
He even asked Mo several questions, ranging from “what makes a good financial advisor?” to others on direct indexing and risk tolerance. Conference attendees were able to ask questions at Morningstar’s Innovation Labs booth, but for the rest of us for now, Mo remains in beta.
My colleague and fellow editor David Bodamer attended the conference and let me know about this after seeing Kapoor’s keynote, which anyone can now read or view.
Schwab Now Has More Than 200 Third-Party Integrations
Schwab Advisor Services announced it crossed the 200-third-party-integrations threshold on Schwab Advisor Center.
I spoke about this very subject with Kartik Srinivasan, head of third-party integrations at Schwab, and Head of Digital Advisor Solutions Alison Dooher during the recent T3 technology conference, among other topics.
Srinivasan said his team of 30, half of them technologists and developers, have continued working on integrations throughout since the acquisition and merger of TD Ameritade into Schwab got formally underway.
The acquisition closed in October 2020 and the technology teams of the two firms had been combined by June 2021.
More than 50 of the 200 integrations are application programming interface integrations, which can provide for deeper connections and in some cases two-way data flow.
“And that 200 is going to continue to grow in future,” said Dooher.
Some of the latest popular advisor applications to integrate with Schwab include the multi-purpose visualisation software platform AssetMap and CRM provider Wealthbox.
As a reminder, the firm’s full client account switchover from TD Ameritrade is set for Labor Day weekend.
“If you left on Friday and you come back on Tuesday it all works—that’s the plan,” said Dooher.
Riskalyze Co-Founder Pistone joins EncoreEstate Plans
Riskalyze co-founder Matt Pistone has joined the technology-based estate planning firm EncorEstate Plans as its CTO. He made the move almost a year after departing the risk metrics and tech provider following its recapitalization with HG Capital.
The estate plan technology landscape is heating up with more providers in the market than ever. In the latest T3/Inside Information Advisor Software Survey, EncorEstate came in with a 1.6% marketshare in the category behind FP Alpha (3.41%) and leader MoneyGuide/Wealth Studios (7.28%). Of the three, EncoreEstate did come in with the highest average satisfaction rating of 7.89, slightly ahead of the others.
Pistone, according to a prepared statement, will focus on building out the company’s technology strategy and be responsible for the firm’s software development, including UI/UX design, API development and implementation. He spent 10 years at Riskalyze and grew the engineering team from just himself to more than 50.
He joins another Riskalyze alum at EncoreEstate Plans: Matt Morris, the company’s CEO, who had been VP of sales at Riskalize before starting with Helios Integrated Planning, from which EncorEstate was spun out in late 2021.
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