Citi’s new patents for an AI wealth “Avatar” might make its advisors nervous

Citi’s wealth business seems to have come a long way over the past few years. The unit which made a loss in 2023 has made $1.6bn in net income, for the year to Q3, but it still lags behind the bank's other units like services and banking which have already exceeded their RoTCE targets. To narrow that gap, Citi Wealth is trying to get rid of its historic reputation for having the “worst tech on the street;” one way it is doing that is with an AI “avatar” that can perform tasks once reserved for the bank’s wealth advisory staff.

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Citi unveiled this concept under the name Citi Sky earlier this year. Since then, Citi has filed multiple patents with the USPTO,* authored by Joseph Bonanno, Citi's head of wealth intelligence, and other Citi contributors. They provide additional details on the scope of these avatars.

Citi’s avatars are a conversational agent with "a representational identity that persists across interactions." These avatars can communicate with clients across different devices (including smart-glasses); responses "can include an audio signal and/or a video signal," and the avatar can use various styles including sign language (Citi said Sky would roll out in English and Spanish only at first). The avatar's responses are influenced by a variety of sources including "investment theses developed by [Citi's] research teams” and "notes documented by an agent during in-person meetings or telephone conversations” 

The Citi Sky unveiling showed one such avatar in the generic human style common of conversational agents currently on the market. However, there seems to be some flexibility as to how this avatar is presented. It displays visual characteristics such as facial features, body structure, and clothing," and presents information "in a format that resembles human-to-human interaction" but can also appear as "a two-dimensional or three-dimensional animated figure.”  Clients can ask for the appearance of this avatar to be augmented but Citi prevents them from having "inappropriate, gory, stereotypical or offensive" appearances, or "uncanny facial expressions" 

Citi markets Sky as “always-on.” Patents show that it achieves this by having agents in the background proactively monitor information sources  for things that might affect their clients. The patents state this is different from many pre-existing robo-advisors which are "typically user-initiated, stateless, and rule-based."

What does this mean for Citi's human advisors? The patents state that agents can hand off tasks to a human advisor which involve "complex financial instruments" or when regulations “mandate human involvement.” Clients can also express a preference for "human handling of certain action types,", and will be directed to a human when an "action requires personalized advice that exceeds the scope of automated processing."

Humans seem to be important for client origination too, although Citi is putting increased focus on staff outside of wealth to do this; Financial News reported yesterday that investment banking staff are each being tasked with converting ‘at least one’ banking client to its wealth business.

Andy Sieg, in an AI-inspired comment during the Sky announcement, said the tech “doesn’t replace our advisors – it makes them more powerful.” He said the bank also “plans to add advisors in the years ahead.” Still, if Sky proves a success, it may leave many people surplus to requirements as Citi continues to prune itself. They will hope the situation is not similar to HSBC’s UK wealth business; the British bank is cutting as many as 70% of staff after bringing in AI tools to assist the division.

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*Patent Numbers: US 12724804, US 12726530, US 12737650