Wealth managers and price comparison sites are among the latest companies to face concerns that new artificial intelligence innovations could disrupt their businesses.
Shares in the British wealth management company plunged on Wednesday morning after AI firm Altruist Corp launched a service to help advisers develop personalized tax strategies by reading their clients’ payslips, financial statements and other documents.
British asset manager St James’s Place fell almost 10% in early trading, while rival Quilter fell 5.2% and AJ Bell fell 5.7%. This was because investors expected that agent tools that allow them to organize their tax affairs and provide advice could put pressure on profits.
Susannah Streeter, chief investment strategist at Wealth Club, warned that advances in AI are creating new victims in the investment world.
“Altruist, a tech startup led by a former Wall Street expert Corp’s big reveal is a new tool to help financial advisors customize tax strategies for their clients and accommodate all managers.The fear is that this is just the tip of the iceberg, as AI unlocks new efficiencies in the financial world. It will disrupt the advice and investment industry and drive down the fees charged.As the AI cards are shuffled, the pile of potential losers is growing, and speculation about which sectors will be hit next is rampant,” Streeter added.
Shares in Britain’s two biggest price comparison sites continued to fall on Wednesday, further widening earlier market declines. Mony Group, owner of Money Supermarket, fell 2% in early trade on Wednesday after closing 12% lower on Tuesday as selling pushed its stock price to a 13-year low.
Go.Compare owner Future was trading 2.7% lower on Wednesday morning, following a 3.6% decline the previous day.
Investors have been nervous about the prospect of disruption from AI and other new technologies since US company Insurify launched a new service that lets people directly compare car insurance quotes using OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
Additionally, Spain-based digital insurance company Tuio plans to provide home insurance quotes directly to ChatGPT users, and other companies are expected to follow suit, further raising concerns that consumers seeking car, home, and travel insurance may turn to chatbots to gather and compare quotes.
Mony Group owns brands such as Moneysupermarket and TravelSupermarket, as well as cashback website Quidco and personal finance help site MoneySavingExpert, started by Martin Lewis.
Future is one of the most shorted UK stocks, with investors expecting its value to fall further.
Sunejna Zakaria, founder and CEO of Insurify, said the company is “redefining the insurance shopping experience by making it feel as easy as having a conversation.”
It added, “Drivers can ask questions in plain language, get personalized quotes, and see real customer feedback, all in one place.”
Insurance and wealth management is the latest sector to suffer significant share price declines this year as a result of concerns about the impact of AI, following declines in publishing, legal software companies and advertising companies.
“Many people are now using chatbots to get information about products and services, so getting insurance quotes through ChatGPT makes a lot of sense,” said Dan Coatsworth, head of markets at brokerage firm AJ Bell.
“The weak share price of the owners of Moneysupermarket and Go.Compare suggests that comparison portals urgently need to find a way to enter the competition. For example, they could incorporate their services into ChatGPT to offer even greater incentives to prospective customers or display their brands more prominently in search results.”
The recent decline of software companies came after Anthropic, the American artificial intelligence startup that created the chatbot Claude, released a tool for use by corporate legal departments.
Anthropic said the tool can automate legal tasks such as contract reviews, nondisclosure agreement triage, compliance workflows, legal briefings, and templated responses.
The news hit the shares of British publishing group Pearson, information and analytics company Relux, and software company Sage.
