Your money is already talking to AI

**Snigdha Sharma** (0:01)
We all have that one forgotten app on our phone, something that we might have signed up for, enabled a feature on, and then completely lost track of. Well, imagine opening that app one day and finding that it has quietly assembled a complete picture of your financial life. Every mutual fund, every bank account, even shares that you don't remember buying, just sitting there organized with AI ready to talk to you through all of it. That is exactly where today's piece begins. And it opens up a much bigger question. As AI inches its way into how we manage and analyze and act on our money, how much of the wheel do we really want to let go of? From platforms like Cred, Zerodha and Groww, integrating AI assistance to Sebi registered advisors, now using AI to generate personalized investment recommendations, the shift is already underway. And with nearly 140 million investors and fewer than a thousand registered advisors to serve them, the math alone might make AI advice not just convenient, but necessary. Today's edition was written by my colleague, Suprita Anupam, and I'm going to read it out to you. The question that it asks is a simple one. Would you trust AI to be your money whisperer?
Welcome to Daybreak, a business podcast from The Ken. I'm your host Snigdha Sharma, and I don't chase the news cycle. Instead, every day of the week, my colleague Rachel Varghese and I will bring you one business story that is worth understanding and worth your time.
Recently, I ventured into a forgotten corner of my Cred app, Cred Money. It was a feature I only vaguely remember having enabled, and to my pleasant surprise, it greeted me with a summary of my entire financial life, scattered across platforms I had not touched in years. Groww, ICICI Direct, HDFC Securities, and so on. To stand out, a holding in Zomato shares, boasting an unrealized gain of 380 percent. I had no memory of buying them.
Platforms like Cred are quietly, with prior express consent, aggregating not just stocks, but also your funds across bank accounts, mutual funds, FDs, EPFs, and NPS, including the sovereign gold bond. And at its heart is an AI named Clio. Built on open AI models, Clio, the company claims, now resolves 98 percent of user queries, learning from, and I quote, data dead ends in real time. Cred is not alone in this reinvention. Many leading investment and fintech players, such as Zerodha, Groww, InMoney, and PhonePay are fast integrating AI into their services.
Going forward, the AI chatbot will be the interface. Set a co-founder of an investment platform that offers AI analysis of one's portfolio. Platforms that are weak on AI are bound to lose traction. And how deeply it's been integrated with the platform services will find its ability to offer sophisticated assistance and advice, he added.
Among the leading platforms, Zerodha and Groww offer AI-assisted workflows via protocols that plug into LLMs like ChatGPT or Cloud. InMoney uses AI for internal data pipelines, feeding its models structured real-time inputs. All that is AI assistance, but some are going beyond mere handholding. MiFi, a Sebi-registered investment advisor platform, comes with AI-generated investment advice, leveraging a combination of AI models to deliver personalized investment recommendations. Another registered investment advisor platform, LotusDew, does the same with investment portfolios. This shift is making old advisory models feel obsolete. The traditional structure of being assigned a portfolio manager for lengthy consultations before they invest on your behalf already seems like a practice from decades past. Similarly, the tedious task of manually logging into and managing separate NPS, EPFO and bank accounts is being streamlined. If given that your logins and access to an application programming interface or API, an agentic AI can take control of your investment platform and with just a few prompts, curate investments to your needs. While the support and execution can be manual, semi-automatic or fully automatic depending on individual needs, platforms like OpenAlgos and U-TradeAlgos offer more sophistication.
AI is quietly changing how we shop for investment products. From assistance to advice to control, the AI is ready. But are we and the regulator? The market regulator Sebi for one seems to be treading cautiously. It has deployed an AI-powered surveillance system to detect fraudsters impersonating registered advisors on social media, along with SebiR-AIDAR, another AI tool to monitor and analyze mutual fund advertisements for potential conduct violations.
It has also made clear the AI use case and its limitations in a framework published in October 2024 Let me read out an excerpt for you. An IA or RA who uses AI tool for servicing its clients, must provide complete disclosure of the extent of use of such tools to its prospective clients to enable them to take informed decision of continuance or otherwise with the IA-RA. Considering that the Investment Advice Research Services provided by IA-RA based on AI tools would affect the investment decision of clients, it is emphasized that the responsibility of data security compliance with the regulatory provisions governing investment advisory services or research services lies solely with the IA-RA, irrespective of the scale and scenario of IA-RA using AI tools.