‘Information asymmetry’ a difficulty for advisers

Speaking at AMP’s Amplify Festival in Sydney, Moven chief executive Brett King said data science and artificial intelligence are able to process and store around 1,000 times more data than a human, leading to asymmetry between humans and AI services.

“Once I have information asymmetry, once they have more data plugged into AI, I will be able to get consistently better advice and decision-making than I get from a human that's limited to their human set of data that they can remember,” he said.

“If you've ever been in the advisory business and you've seen a difference in quality between one human adviser and another, you'll get what I mean in respect to this. So this is the key challenge we've got in financial services when it comes to advice.”

Mr King said that by 2025, “more people will get advice on a daily basis from a technology-based solution rather than through a human” due to the proliferation of mobile technology and financial services apps, adding that this transition is occurring much faster than previous technology-led changes within the industry.

“That's twice the speed of how e-commerce changed the transactions that we do on the web,” he said.

“We're seeing this at about twice the rate of growth compared with e-commerce in terms of adoption of this.”