AI was a key recurring theme discussed at the 2025 Morningstar Investment Conference, particularly for the investment platform industry.
Speaking at the conference last week, HUB24 chief executive Andrew Alcock described AI as both a significant opportunity and threat to the future of Australia’s platforms.
“There’s a massive enabler there that will enable businesses – whether it be productivity, customer engagement, insights and so forth. There is also a threat there in terms of how we leverage this technology. It’s a huge opportunity to do things more efficiently and achieve the purpose that we’ve all got,” Alcock said.
The CEO compared platforms’ adoption of AI to the process of building a plane while you fly it, with new technological changes rapidly unfolding each day.
“I say we’re trying to build an airplane in the sky. This thing’s flying and it’s changing while we’re building it. You’ve got to be careful where you invest and how you invest. You’ve got to put the safeguards or the guardrails around this data,” he said.
“It’s really, really exciting and hopefully we can disrupt ourselves rather than being disrupted by big tech. I think we’re well on the way to do that.”
Matt Heine, CEO and managing director at Netwealth, also said keeping up with the advancements of AI is challenging even for a company centred around the provision of technology.
“I’m living in a pretty constant state of paranoia at the moment about everything AI. It is moving so quickly at the moment. It is incredibly challenging to keep up with it and we’re a technology business,” he said at the conference.
Heine referenced new data that discovered click-through rates from Google’s search results have fallen by almost 30 per cent over the past year. Instead, some users are opting to harness AI chatbots such as ChatGPT, Perplexity or Claude for their queries, as opposed to traditional search functions.
“What that means from a user experience [is that] clients are expecting the same level of service that they got from the last best experience,” the Netwealth managing director said.
“So, if all of our customers are interacting with their data and their search boxes in a particular way, that’s going to be the expectation of how they interact with their wealth data and with their providers in this industry.”
These user expectations, Heine added, will have “radical” impacts for how wealth platforms present data and communicate with their financial adviser client base in the future.
He continued: “I think the way that the interface operates, the way that we present data, the way that you interrogate data, is going to change the way that we all operate pretty radically over the next three to five years.
“It’s super exciting what’s going on, incredibly scary, and something that really does require all of us in this room and certainly on this stage to be across what’s going on and how we can best deploy it into our environments for the benefits of clients and advisers.”
Speaking at their respective annual general meetings last year, both HUB24 and Netwealth shared their future plans in the AI space and which areas they believe can be used within the business. These included customer service, corporate governance and client engagement.
At Netwealth, it said AI offers “incredible opportunities” for the platform to optimise its processes. This includes automation of repetitive tasks, data processing and analysis, portfolio reporting and analysis, knowledge base management, sentiment analysis, and call transcription.
Meanwhile, HUB24 said leveraging AI, robotics, and automation for efficiency purposes were identified as ways for the platform to be future ready. Moreover, the platform intends to use AI to drive productivity with emerging technology with an AI-driven mail house for institutional clients.
