The wealth management industry has moved quickly from digitalisation to artificial intelligence (AI), but the next stage of transformation may depend less on the capabilities of the technology itself than on the systems, processes and human relationships around it.
That was a recurring theme across the morning sessions at The Wealth Mosaic’s AI in Wealth 2026: APAC event in Singapore on 24 September. From a keynote from Standard Chartered executive director Kaushik Kadayam, to a discussion between a family office and wealth management firm, and a fireside on AI and marketing, speakers explored what needs to change for AI to deliver meaningful value.
The backend problem
Opening the event, Kaushik Kadayam, Executive Director at Standard Chartered, argued that the industry’s enthusiasm for AI is running ahead of the underlying infrastructure needed to support it.
“AI is great – but AI needs a robust backend workflow and operations and technology is important,” he said. He compared the current situation to lifting weights with one arm while neglecting the other: “We are lifting a lot more on the right arm and we're really bulking it up here. But the left arm is still very skimpy and skinny.”
He argued that sophisticated AI capabilities can only take wealth firms so far if the processes beneath them remain fragmented or manual. He pointed to legacy systems that lack APIs and to processes that can still involve people manually transferring information between systems.
The uneven distribution of technology across markets is another factor, he said. While markets including Singapore, Hong Kong and London have made significant progress, greenfield markets where technology adoption remains less advanced could offer more scope for genuinely transformative applications.
The challenge is also one of risk appetite, he said. Client confidentiality and data restrictions limit what firms can use; regulators, compliance, and risk teams also need to be comfortable with the technology. “They have to come hand in hand with what the industry wants,” he said.
For that reason, much current technology investment is going towards the foundations required for transformation rather than AI alone. Kadayam estimated that around 90 percent of banking technology investment is still directed towards upgrading technology, moving to the cloud, and “getting the basics right” – leaving a much smaller proportion for transformation.
The opportunity, he suggested, is ultimately to move from individual AI use cases towards end-to-end processes. “I actually think we're going to evolve in a way where we're going to automate the entire process front-to-back with AI,” he said.
But greater automation would not remove the relationship from wealth management. Kadayam argued that firms would still need to win client trust and keep customers informed as new processes are introduced.
“The fact that we still need relationship managers, and we don't have AI talking to clients, signifies that trust is the biggest win here,” he said.
What do wealth firms actually want?
The panel that followed shifted the focus from what AI can do to what wealth firms and allocators actually want it to do.
Tawishi Singh, Head of Partnerships & Channels at Singaporean wealth management platform Keenai, said the organisation sees AI’s internal productivity potential clearly, but is taking a more cautious approach to client-facing applications.
“Do we want to necessarily be the first one to be out there doing it? No, because I think we'd rather tread carefully than necessarily be the first one out and doing it wrong,” she said.
She added that adoption takes time, not just for technology reasons but because of factors including data, risk governance, regulation, people, education, and differing levels of enthusiasm across an organisation.
For Tuck Meng Yee, Founder and CIO of Singapore-based single-family office JRT, the priority is not speed for its own sake. “I don't care about the speed necessarily. I care that it’s accurate and achieves the results,” he said.
That distinction was reflected in the practical use cases the panel discussed. Singh highlighted portfolio generation and analysis as an area where AI had already proved useful internally, while also stressing that “ultimately the human has to assess it”. She also pointed to risk and compliance as another potential productivity use case, where AI could handle repetitive work and allow specialists to spend more time on higher-value activities.
Yee similarly identified portfolio reporting, reconciliations, and document review as areas where technology can produce substantial efficiency gains while maintaining human oversight. Singh suggested that AI could be used effectively in those risk and compliance functions with standardised documents, agreements, and repetitive processes.
He appealed to vendors to stop approaching buyers with narratives about new AI-enabled software without first establishing the underlying pain point. “What is it they are actually solving for? Is this three hours saved or not?”
That scepticism extends to AI being added to existing processes without fundamentally improving them, “dressing up the same chatbots with AI conversation,” he said. What matters is ultimately investment effectiveness and client relationship.
Personalisation has limits
The final morning session, a fireside between Nicole Teo, Vice President Marketing at global investment institution Lighthouse Canton, and Mark Yeo Tee Shen, Head of Investment Advisory at Singapore-based digital wealth management platform StashAway and Ambassador for The Wealth Mosaic, brought the discussion closer to the client.
Both speakers explored the potential for AI to personalise marketing and client interactions, but also the danger that greater personalisation could undermine trust if clients feel they are being watched too closely.
Teo argued that AI can support increasingly sophisticated personalisation, but that wealth remains an unusually emotional subject for clients. “Money is very emotional to people,” she said. “Do they trust an AI? No. But what I've seen more increasingly is they trust a relationship manager that is equipped correctly with the right AI.”
That distinction between AI replacing the relationship and AI augmenting the relationship also applied to advice itself. Teo argued that AI cannot understand the client properly if the human relationship manager has not captured the relevant context around their circumstances, objectives, and attitudes.
Shen made a similar point from the investment-advisory side, saying that he had experimented with AI-generated recommendations but had found a significant difference between those outputs and the way he would construct and tailor a portfolio himself: “There is a lot of missing context.”
The same tension emerged around AI-driven marketing. Shen noted that StashAway had automated parts of its marketing workflows, and used AI across functions including marketing and design, but had not moved to a fully autonomous marketing machine.
Teo's offered another explanation for why human involvement remains important: “AI doesn't have taste.”
Both speakers argued that personalisation depends on more than simply feeding more customer data into an AI model. It requires judgement about what information is appropriate to use, how it should be interpreted and where the boundary lies between relevance and intrusion.
The emphasis at AI in Wealth 2026: APAC was less on whether AI could deliver value than on what needs to be in place for that value to be realised: data, infrastructure, governance, workflow design, and human oversight.
The technology may be advancing rapidly, but making it useful in wealth management remains an organisational as much as a technological challenge.
This is the first in our set of reflections and insights from AI in Wealth 2026: APAC. Watch this space for future articles considering how to safely embed AI into advisory workflows and using AI to unlock wealth for the mass-affluent segment.
About our Toolkit Roadshow series
The Wealth Mosaic’s Toolkit Roadshows are a series of events designed to help wealth managers better understand how technology can address specific business challenges and support the evolving needs of the wealth management sector.
AI in Wealth 2026: APAC was the first in this series to take place in Singapore. The Toolkit Roadshow will be returning to Singapore on 19 November for Portfolios in Wealth 2026: APAC. Get your tickets here.
About The Wealth Mosaic
The Wealth Mosaic is a UK-headquartered online solution provider directory and knowledge resource, focused specifically on the wealth management industry.
For wealth managers, the buy side of our marketplace, The Wealth Mosaic is designed to enable discovery of key solutions, solution providers and knowledge resources by specific business needs.
For solution providers and vendors, the sell side of our marketplace, The Wealth Mosaic exists to support the positioning, exposure and business development needs of these firms in a more complex and demanding market.
