Claude has entered the chat. Will tens of thousands of RIAs reply?

Last week's unveiling of Claude for Financial Advisors, for which giant AI firm Anthropic lined up nearly a dozen big-name collaborators and announced at one of the largest conferences in wealth management, certainly captured the industry's attention.

But the Claude suite of software connectors and workflow aids, which will integrate 11 of the largest wealth and asset management firms and technology providers, will now face an even bigger challenge: recruiting financial advisors, who vary widely in firm size and preference, and who also have heard many promises over the years of seamless data capabilities for their desktops. Digital advances have already radically altered advisors' so-called tech stacks. However, no firm claims to have solved every related problem, and several firms responded to the Claude announcement by citing their own similar tools.

The success of Claude for Financial Advisors, then, will revolve around how the technology fits the specific needs of tens of thousands of registered investment advisory firms and other advisory practices. So, even among a group of collaborators that included familiar industry names like Vanguard, BlackRock, Envestnet, Orion, SS&C Black Diamond and Addepar, the participation of Charles Schwab and its Schwab Advisor Services stood out as the only custodian on the list. 

While any advisors who sign up for the new Claude suite will pay for it through existing or new Anthropic licenses rather than by sending any additional payments to Schwab, they will likely be judging its effectiveness largely based upon how well it works with the industry's largest custodian. 

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Time on your side?

Schwab executives like Alison Dooher, the head of AI at the firm's custodian business, view the potential impact on advisors' time with clients as "particularly important" to the collaboration, she said. That represents "several of the large players across the industry coming together" in an effort that will be "tying all their disparate tools that, really, they're working with everyday" into one location on the desktop.

 "The whole point of this is really to allow advisors to continue to leverage the tools that they're using in a way more efficient way," she said. "They can be more present in the moment with their clients."

The difficulty of wriggling free from administrative, operational, compliance-related or other types of tasks to devote more time to clients and prospective customers remains a large concern among many advisors — even in the age of AI. Schwab has planned the launch of its Claude connector tools for the fourth quarter, with Dooher suggesting there will be more details on the timeline available next month around the firm's annual IMPACT conference in Boston.

Advisors' use of their valuable time loomed large in both the announcement of the Claude suite on the Anthropic blog and a panel at last week's Future Proof conference, where the firm's head of asset and wealth management, Peter Nolan, participated in a panel called, "The End of the Swivel: Rethinking the Advisor's Day with AI." In a LinkedIn post, Nolan praised the 11 collaborating firms, "design partners" who were "pressure-testing every skill" of the new suite at Rockefeller Capital Management, Mercer Advisors, Ritholtz Wealth Management and Dynasty Financial Partners, and the internal development team and external consultants at Artium AI.

"Financial wellness improves when people get the right advice. The problem is only 4/10 have an advisor, and it's a supply issue; the typical advisor spends just 1/6 of their time with clients, while the rest goes to prep, paperwork and toggling between systems. Free them up, and more people get help," Nolan wrote. "Claude for Financial Advisors is an AI orchestrator connecting to custodians, portfolio management, CRMs, planning, estate and meeting tools advisors already use. On top of that sit skills built around an advisor's day: meeting prep, follow-up, rebalance reviews, estate and tax briefs and compliance review."

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Winning over swing voters?

Advisors on the ground, and the clients they serve, will ultimately be the ones who decide whether the Claude suite achieves those goals. 

Atlanta-based RIA firm Merit Financial Advisors has been investing in technology with the aim of avoiding any reliance on a single vendor, according to Rick Kent, the CEO and founder of Merit, and Kay Lynn Mayhue, president of the firm, which has more than $32 billion in client assets across more than 70 offices. Like many RIA owners, they view industry tech through the lens of their particular business.   

"We knew we didn't want to be dependent on any broker-dealer or anybody else," Kent said. "At the end of the day, competition is a great thing. Competition is what creates great athletes. Competition is what creates great businesses."

In that sense, Merit's technology philosophy has revolved around the need to "be continuously evolving" while deploying an "enormous amount of time and money and talent" toward those tools, Mayhue said. In thinking back over the past decade, she said the biggest shift in Merit's technology has come from eliminating manual data entry and chores that required staff members to log the same data in multiple areas of the advisor desktop. Now each possible new capability comes with the question of how well it functions there.

"Those days are completely over," Mayhue said. "That is not a stack, that's a blend, that's a recipe. … That has greatly evolved, and I don't think that's a luxury now."   

In other words, the Claude suite hasn't changed RIA technology or the custodian business overnight.

"At first glance, Claude for Financial Advisors appears to be more evolutionary than revolutionary," Brian Green, Merit's chief product officer, said in an emailed statement. "Most of the underlying capabilities already exist across advisor technology platforms today. The real question is whether Anthropic can move beyond data aggregation and support the highly specific, often firm-specific workflows that advisors rely on. If it can, Claude becomes a true advisor operating layer. If not, it risks becoming just another integration on an already crowded desktop."

At the same time, Anthropic is also developing other tools. On the same day Anthropic and Schwab unveiled the Claude suite, St. Petersburg, Florida-based Dynasty, an independent RIA services provider, rolled out its own announcement of a new AI operating system for advisors through a collaboration with Anthropic's Claude models. More than 750 advisors with $140 billion in assets under administration across Dynasty's network use its services.

"We have been talking with Peter Nolan and his team about what this industry actually needs for a while now, well before either announcement," Leslie Norman, Dynasty's chief technology officer, said in an email interview. "When we walked Peter through the differentiated experience we wanted to build for Dynasty advisors, he connected us with Artium, the same development shop that built Claude for Financial Advisors, so we had a world-class engineering partner to build out our book-level AI capabilities. The way Peter put it in our release, Dynasty is the kind of platform they built Claude to power."

Each new AI-powered feature for advisors and their clients will fuel more competition, she said.  

"Data access has been the friction point in wealth management for as long as I have been in it," Norman said. "That momentum is going to keep building as more platforms come online, and it is good for every advisor, every custodian and every vendor, including Dynasty. Additionally, we have seen smaller digital first custodians have impressive features but lacked the ability to serve more sophisticated advisors and clients that the larger custodians support. What we are now seeing is the move to have the best of both worlds from custodians like Schwab. Clients and RIAs will both benefit from this increased competition in the digital age we live in."

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No rivals are giving up the fight

Rivals to Schwab in the competitive fight for clearing and custody business across advisory practices no doubt took notice of its role in the Claude suite. But they aren't likely to drop out of that race anytime soon.

Representatives for Fidelity Investments declined to comment on the news. In addition to operating the second largest custody business in the industry, Fidelity's Fidelity Management & Research Company arm co-led Anthropic's Series F fundraising round last year of $13 billion at a valuation of $183 billion.

Other large clearing and custody providers have shown less reticence in responding to the announcement. For example, Raymond James issued a press release this week pointing out it is spending $1.1 billion each year on technology, including on an expanded relationship for "the next generation of AI-powered insights and experiences for financial advisors and their clients" with Amazon Web Services.

In another LinkedIn post last week, LPL Financial's chief product and technology officer, Greg Gates, congratulated Anthropic on "an important step forward, not only for the industry but for our ongoing partnership." LPL is "bringing the best of AI innovation to advisors in ways that are practical, secure and compliant" through its own collaboration with Anthropic as well, Gates said.

"We're exploring opportunities to enable direct use of Anthropic's Claude for our clients while maintaining regulatory compliance and controls needed to safeguard sensitive data," he wrote. "We know that financial advisors and their clients prioritize regulatory compliance and security above all else, and that remains our utmost priority. LPL's flagship AI agent, Cyan, leverages many of the same Anthropic MCP integrations, combined with additional compliance and regulatory controls designed specifically for the needs of financial advisors." 

The Claude suite serves as "a strong example of how AI can help financial advisors work more effectively every day," Adam Vos, the global head of wealth solutions at wealth management custodian Pershing's parent firm BNY, said in a statement. "BNY invested in AI early, and we're focused on bringing those capabilities into the platforms advisors use today and those they will use in the future, while continuing to strengthen the custody, clearing and execution services behind them. Our goal is to deliver practical, AI-enabled solutions that work across AI environments and the wealth ecosystem to help advisors do more for clients."

And Claude's announcement came only the month after upstart custodian Altruist released financial planning tools through its own AI suite, Hazel, as well as its blockbuster deal to be acquired by Vanguard.

"More attention on AI in wealth management is good for advisors, and we welcome it," Mazi Bahadori, the firm's chief operating officer and chief compliance officer, said in a statement. "Where we differ is what we are building toward. Most AI tools are designed to sit on top of the stack an advisor already runs, connecting seven or eight subscriptions and making them easier to query. We want to condense that stack. Advisors have told us for years that they want to pay for fewer tools that do more. That is what Hazel is built for, and our focus is on serving independent advisors."

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Bing Guan/Bloomberg News

How Claude will work for Schwab clients at the firm level

In response to the criticism that the Claude suite may become simply another layer on top of advisors' existing desktops, Dooher of Schwab pointed out that every AI tool "is something that sits on top of other datasets" and countered that the firm is "looking to support each channel that an advisor wants to interact through."

Any RIAs that opt into the Claude suite will "activate the connector at the firm level," with control over which specific users can access it and the masking of personal information such as account and Social Security Numbers, as well as the clients' dates of birth, she said. (Dooher also told industry publication InvestmentNews that Schwab's agreement with Claude includes language prohibiting the AI models from training themselves using the clients' data.)

And if they do decide to use the suite, advisors will still be able to pull up, for example, accounts due for a required minimum distribution, possible meeting topics and other "really quick analysis on some operational gaps that you might want to shore up," Dooher said. The firm will provide more updates in the weeks to come, especially at IMPACT. 

"We have 40 years of history of working with advisors," she said. "We've learned over the years that choice matters. We've really leaned into the ability to choose your solution."