by Antonello di Mascio, Chief Research Officer of the Gruppo Excellence
The financial market is an intangible market where ideas, forecasts, and evaluations are exchanged.
Each individual transaction is based on confidence in the accuracy of one’s information, enabling each investor to outline an expected scenario and therefore take positions in the market.
Wealth management is the human component of the financial market, where intermediaries provide advice to their clients. This advice can be generated by analysts, by software, or by analysts using increasingly sophisticated software capable of analyzing and processing billions of data points and pieces of information, such as artificial intelligence. Wealth management is an intangible industry in which the client–advisor relationship of trust generates market positions based on available information and forecasts.
In recent years, more than individual economic data, news related to technological innovation has been driving investors’ decisions. Technological innovation and the development of artificial intelligence are the subject of analysis and study by major investors because of the impact they will have across many sectors. However, a year ago the equity markets experienced a sharp decline following the arrival of DeepSeek, a Chinese startup specializing in artificial intelligence that had launched its own open-source AI model. On January 28, 2025, Nvidia’s stock fell by 17 percent, and the company as a whole lost just under 600 billion dollars in market value. Did no one know this startup? It was surprising to see analysts’ astonishment and the market reaction, as if the Chinese startup had arrived from another planet.
Similarly, a few days ago, the stocks of intermediaries active in wealth management (brokers, banks, and insurance companies) suffered significant losses in a single trading session due to a series of fintech-related news items—once again caught by surprise. In particular, Tuio and Altruist had the same impact as DeepSeek a year earlier. The former is a Spanish company that, through ChatGPT, allows users to request and obtain insurance quotes, effectively bypassing the role of agents; the latter is a platform useful to independent advisors because it simplifies back-office activities (from account opening to portfolio rebalancing to tax calculations), enabling significant savings in time and costs.
Was the market reaction excessive? In our view, yes, for several reasons. The first is inherent in valuations: market performance is close to historical highs, and the stocks of companies active in wealth management have also set record after record. In other words, markets still exhibit elevated valuations despite a generally uncertain economic and geopolitical environment. Secondly, because the wealth management industry itself is investing in AI to reduce operating costs, simplify processes, improve platform security, and optimize investment processes.
Technological innovation and AI have for years represented a driver of development and evolution in wealth management, which by its nature needs to improve the Intermediary–Advisor–Client relationship. In this regard, there is another element to consider: AI should be conceived as daily support for the work of financial advisors. Modern Wealth Planners will adopt AI to manage all clients optimally, communicate continuously with them, offer personalized reporting, monitor portfolio risks and market opportunities based on each client’s specific needs, generate increasingly personalized and ongoing investment proposals, speed up administrative operations, and reduce administrative costs.
This does not mean that new fintech companies will not have an impact on the market. On the contrary, as seen a few days ago, they are effectively a lever to accelerate the evolutionary path of wealth management within incumbent financial groups in general. Being intangible, wealth management will need to demonstrate a strong capacity to adapt to technological innovation—not to replace the advisor, but to support them in their relationship with all clients.
As Excellence, we support our clients in this acceleration and in the process of adapting to external fintech dynamics.
