CogniCor, developer of an industry-leading, artificial intelligence-powered business automation and learning platform for the financial services industry, announced that it has established a formal relationship with Charles Schwab to provide solutions enabled by AI in its affiliated registered investment advisors through Schwab’s Managed Account Marketplace.
Sequoia Financial Group, in Akron, Ohio, is the first Schwab affiliate to take advantage of the new partnership.
Venture-funded, woman-founded and backed by Morgan Stanley, CogniCor, with headquarters in California and India, is focused on using artificial intelligence solutions to help wealth management companies, insurance companies and other financial services organizations to increase productivity and accelerate growth.
Central to CogniCor’s service model is CIRA, a scalable platform for designing and managing AI-powered digital assistants that can shepherd clients (and advisors) through lead generation processes through on-boarding, product selection, account management, customer support and IT issues, and access to financial resources or professional education. The technology was developed by CEO and founder Sindhu Joseph, a research scientist with a PhD in artificial intelligence who holds six US patents, some of which involve acquiring and organizing intelligent information from others’ other sources.
CIRA collects information from documents and portals to provide practice and client-specific answers, while combining inductive and deductive reasoning to provide context for human-like responses to complex questions. It uses knowledge graphs (concept maps that integrate specific context and background information) to establish a knowledge base that provides accelerated interpretation of user intent and solutions tailored to specific need.
“AI-enabled digital assistants are uniquely positioned to alleviate the issues born of significant M&A growth within this industry,” Joseph said in a statement. “Our relationship with Schwab addresses the significant demand for these solutions from the nation’s leading RIAs.”
RIAs affiliated with Charles Schwab will have access to CogniCor’s suite of AI-enabled digital assistants and learning platforms. Once an RIA establishes a direct agreement with the firm, CogniCor’s digital assistant will facilitate deployment for advisors from processing through custody. The firm can integrate these solutions into daily operations, continuously improving them to increase efficiency and automate many back-office functions.
Sequoia—one of Schwab’s largest RIA affiliates, with about $10 billion in client assets—is working with CogniCor to test its latest AI-enabled solution at scale, according to the announcement. Meeting Assistant works with advisors and Sequoia’s Salesforce-based CRM to automate pre- and post-meeting paperwork, create dynamic agendas and help track life events and milestones for clients in real time time.
“As we looked to improve the efficiency of our advisors without any impact on the client experience, we identified the administrative processes around the client advisor meeting as an area ripe for improvement,” said Sequoia CTO Trevor Chuna. “Working closely with CogniCor, we have selected a number of areas where we believe this technology can reduce time spent on repetitive administrative activities. We are very pleased to roll out these seamless tools collated with our advisers in the coming months.”
“Currently, advisors and employees are forced to spend about 40% of their time performing tasks, manual tasks,” Joseph said. “This time should be devoted to serving clients and performing other value-creating activities. By providing its RIA affiliates with access to our business automation and learning platforms, Schwab will be able to fuel additional growth opportunities for its customers.”
“We look forward to our partnership with Sequoia as we address this particular opportunity and provide their advisors with a fully integrated, AI-enabled solution that helps them focus on what matters most,” said he, “the relationships with clients.”
CIRA’s currently supported integrations include: Salesforce, SharePoint, Skype, Adobe, Genesys, LiveChat, Twilio, ServiceNow and Pershing’s NetX360.
CogniCor was named a 2022 recently WealthManagement.com Industry Awards finalist in the business support systems/workflow automation category, selected by a panel of judges from over 1,000 entrants based on impact, scope, scale, adoption, features, innovation, creativity and new ways of service delivery.