BNP Paribas Wealth Management is testing a new mobile investment advisory tool, myAdvisory, the company said yesterday. The app offers investment advice, except instead of using robos – like the SigFigs of the world – the advice is written entirely by humans.
The app offers a personalized financial advice based on investment guidelines set by clients – such as portfolio and risk preferences – and provides recommendations at a frequency defined by the user. The tool also allows clients to verify portfolio performance at any point, including a simulation feature, which shows the potential impact of any given investment.
Investment advice comes in message form, which includes graphs and videos, created entirely by BNP’s Wealth Management team, a company spokeswoman confirmed. The tool also offers an in-app chat-based trading platform – again, with human advisors, not bots.
“Clients are able to view their portfolios, receive online trade notifications, and chat with their investment specialist, in a highly secured environment with a history of all discussions,” according to the app description.
Each advisory “session” lasts a few minutes, “so it’s perfect when clients are travelling and have a spare moment, for example at the airport,” Vincent Lecomte, CEO of BNP Wealth Management, said in a statement.
The project has been developed with a “mobile-first” mindset, according to the spokeswoman, so none of the features were previously available through the web. “We are in a co-creation process, currently in a test phase with clients, and the existing product will be then adapted [and rolled out] thanks to this input to build the final one,” she said.
Additionally, the app offers users a personalized news feed from more than 100 news sources, including trends on social media from the investment community, tailored specifically to a client’s portfolio.
When asked about plans for a future robo feature, the spokeswoman said that investment advice “will in any case still be written by real people” but did not directly state such features were not under consideration.
BNP Paribas Wealth Management has €344 billion assets under management ($367 billion), and has 6,600 advisors on its team.