Orion reveals ChatGPT integration at Ascent conference

Orion Advisor Solutions might become the first company to bring OpenAI’s ChatGPT engine to financial advisors.

A new integration between ChatGPT and Redtail Speak, the compliant client texting platform offered through Redtail CRM, lets the artificial intelligence analyze conversations and suggest responses. Advisors can then edit the responses as they see fit and send, said Orion CEO Eric Clarke, who announced the integration Tuesday at the company’s annual Ascent conference in Orlando, Florida.

A third of advisors already viewed AI as the most disruptive technology trend facing the financial services industry, and that was before commercial interest in AI exploded, Clarke said, citing data collected from an Orion technology survey. But only 18% plan to make exploratory investments in AI and machine learning over the next three years.

Bringing ChatGPT to Redtail Speak is an easy way to help advisors understand what's possible if they add AI technology into their practice, Clarke told InvestmentNews. Eventually, the company sees potential to feed data points — without any personally identifiable information, Clarke clarified — into the AI to suggest ways advisors can talk about portfolio analytics that go beyond traditional reports.

“A lot of advisors are natural at speaking to portfolio analytics, but then creating narratives around that and being able to create speaking points beyond being able to respond to text messages is going to be the next step for us,” Clarke said. “This is the beginning of a journey to integrate AI into our applications.”

Orion’s engineering team has been beta-testing the ChatGPT application programming interface (API) internally for a few months now, and the company is aiming to make it available to advisors in the next couple of months, added Brian McLaughlin, the former CEO of Redtail who was named president of Orion Advisor technology as part of a corporate reorganization in September. Orion acquired Redtail in April.

“Speak was the most natural place to go put that in because that’s conversational,” McLaughlin said. “I don’t think we have any deadlines, per se. I think we want to make sure we go and explore all the different avenues as quickly as possible.”

If the company can make its soft goal of 60 days, it could be the first to bring an application of ChatGPT to market for financial advisors. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has said that his company is working on something for Morgan Stanley advisors and their clients, but the company has not yet made any public announcements.

BEHAVIORAL FINANCE

Clarke kicked off his keynote address by reviewing some of the efforts Orion is making to help wealth management firms incorporate behavioral finance ideas into their practices, something that has been more challenging than the executive anticipated.  

“Two-and-a-half years ago, when we started to work with [Orion chief behavioral officer] Dr. Daniel Crosby, I thought the tools would be adopted quicker than they have been,” Clarke told InvestmentNews.

Orion recently launched an Advisor Academy to help advisors better learn how to use its behavioral finance tools, such as the “3D Risk Profile” and BeFi 20, the company’s approach to risk assessment that incorporates a client’s emotions and values.  

“These tools … will help the advisor understand what the client is trying to accomplish,” Clarke said. “They’re not precise outcomes, they’re more conversational in nature, which in many cases advisors are uncomfortable with having those conversations. That’s what the Advisor Academy can help provide resources around.”

Orion’s client portals now features investment bucketing to show how assets are being directed toward various aspects of the financial plan. The company calls the buckets “protect, live and dream,” but advisors can tweak the names and number of buckets, for example by adding a fourth for charitable giving. Bucketing makes clients 12 times less likely to revert to cash in difficult markets, and twice as likely to increase long-term savings, Clarke said.

“This seemingly simple process of investment bucketing can have profound behavioral impact,” he added.

In addition to AI, Clarke also unveiled a new enhancement to Orion's custom indexing product called Story Paths that advisors can use to generate a proposal for a new account or transition an existing account to a new portfolio built with direct indexing.

Orion now has $7 billion on its platform from registered investment advisors using its custom indexing platform, Clarke said. He expects that to grow as advisors realize the opportunity to build platforms tailored to a client’s life and goals.

Through organic growth and eight M&A deals since 2018, Orion has expanded into a significant force in both advisor fintech and outsourced asset management. The company now has $3.7 trillion in assets across its platform, including $60 billion in wealth management assets. The Redtail acquisition brought more than 110,000 advisors into the fold, Clarke said.

The company is bringing the proposal generation tool it launched for portfolio solutions customers over to its technology customers. The tool is integrated with Orion Connect, Planning, the Communities model marketplace, Risk Intelligence and Redtail CRM.

Orion also announced that its entire ecosystem has been moved to Amazon Web Services over the last 18 months, which is allowing for more real-time data syncing between the technology and an advisor’s firm, as well as helping to process large amounts of information, which is a big deal for large firms, according Joel Bruckenstein, producer of the Technology Tools for Today conference.