The Future Of Capital Markets Ep 3 Kathleen O Reilly Leveraging Technology For Access

With rapid advances in technology and lower minimums, it's really lifted the barriers to being able to get started in investing. There's actually gaps across the entire wealth spectrum, but certainly those in lower financial sectors have perhaps a bigger gap. And it's important that they understand those products and platforms available to them and have access to the appropriate financial advice. New technologies such as AI and machine learning really will allow institutions to deliver that financial advice at scale. And in fact, 70% of investors say that they would actually take the advice generated instantly from an algorithm if they had the opportunity to. So this is a really important tool as we move forward. It doesn't replace the need for the human advice at those moments that matter the most, but new technology and the digital transformations that are allowing us to do things at scale are gonna make a huge difference for retail investing. There are gaps around awareness and contextualization of products. For example, we find out that many investors actually lack an understanding of some of the more traditional products like stocks and bonds. 40% of investors don't understand bonds, while only 29%, interestingly, say that they don't understand cryptocurrencies. So one of the things that's really important is that we educate investors on those more traditional products such as bonds. Gamification for good is a concept that allows us to incentivize good investing behaviors with potential and existing investors. It makes investing engaging, and it also takes investors along that learning journey since education is so critical. And when you think about it, it will also allow people to find new ways to invest and to think differently about how they invest. Now, of course, gamification can also inadvertently be used to incentivize unhealthy investing behaviors. And so we need to be very careful about how we use the technology and hence the concept of gamification for good. So this is an area that we think is really going to grow in helping with that education journey. We believe that the empowered investor is the future of responsible investing. The empowered investor has, first of all, access to and knowledge of the products and services and channels open to them. So they not only need access to those products and services, but they need to be in a broad set of markets, public and private markets. They need to have access to advice and the new tools available to them, and they need to be able to have a holistic view of both the short and long-term. This is one of the areas that we're really going to take in our next step of research with Bank of New York Mellon and the World Economic Forum, looking at, for example, the future of financial advice and how we can look at those new channels and enablers to figure out how we enable that next generation of investors.