Meet The Chatbots That Might Manage Your Money One Day

When it comes to banking and finance, chatbots are everywhere. In the future, they’ll be doing more than answering your questions and providing phone numbers, according to people who work in artificial intelligence.

Chatbots will be more proactive, says Zor Gorelov, chief executive of Kasisto, a company creating conversational AI for banking and finance clients. They’ll be able to anticipate individuals’ needs and offer advice before users even ask a question, though there is still a long way to go before many of these features become a reality.

Instead of pointing you to a resource such as a phone line or FAQ page, chatbots could one day be resources themselves, able to offer highly personalised responses to individual questions and scenarios.

Daria Zabój, product marketer at ChatBot, an AI software developer, says chatbots will be able to analyze investment questions, such as whether to invest in gold or bitcoin, in real time. At Chatbot, products like Cleo and the Covid-19 Risk Assessment Chatbot already take questions and process them to offer limited advice, but Ms. Zabój says that tools like this need more years of practice and thousands more conversations to improve their personalized instruction.

Fidelity Investments imagines a world of virtual assistants that will greatly reduce the need for clients to call and speak to a person. Decades from now—or years, depending on how quickly the tech advances—a bot like this could evaluate itself on task completion by better perceiving what an individual wants from an interaction.

Chatbots may become more lifelike by incorporating audio and humanlike forms. As augmented reality grows in popularity, users may want to invite the chatbots into their physical environments. This way, individuals could try out consumer products or ask for advice from a chatbot that answers their questions via voice assistant or computer-designed avatars.

As these chatbot experiments go mainstream, however, Ms. Zabój predicts some users will want companies to ask for their input on what feels too lifelike.

More people have to use chatbots to build better databases of chats and improve the bots, says Szymon Klimczak, chief marketing officer of LiveChat, ChatBot’s parent company. “As of now, all these scenarios are still very basic because the industry is still very young,” he says.

A new investment fund targeting celebrity-founded consumer brands has secured US$40 million in commitments and is rapidly approaching its US$50 million fundraising target, signalling growing investor appetite for alternative opportunities beyond traditional asset classes.

The Global Talent Fund, which has a maximum raise of US$100 million, focuses on building and investing in consumer businesses alongside celebrities, athletes, and influential personalities who play an active role as co-founders rather than simply endorsing products.

The strategy is based on the belief that changes in consumer behaviour, particularly the rise of social media and digital engagement, have fundamentally altered how brands are built and scaled.

GTF founding partner Jeremy Hunt, who is helping lead the fund’s strategy, said consumers increasingly feel connected to personalities they follow online and are more willing to support products developed by those individuals.

“Consumers are searching for content to engage with, and when a celebrity they like or follow takes them on the journey of creating a product or brand, they genuinely feel part of that process,” he said.

The fund is targeting high-growth consumer sectors including wellness, hydration, beauty and recovery, areas Hunt believes continue to benefit from strong global demand and ongoing innovation.

Rather than backing celebrity endorsement deals, the fund is seeking businesses where talent is deeply involved in product development, brand creation and long-term growth.

According to Hunt, authenticity remains one of the biggest differentiators between successful celebrity-backed brands and those that fail.

“The consumer can see clearly if someone is simply being paid to promote a product,” he said. “The winners are typically the brands where the celebrity has genuinely helped build the business from the ground up.”

The model has attracted support from several prominent Australian investors and business families, reflecting broader interest in alternative investments with global growth potential.

Hunt said consumer brands offered a level of tangibility that many investors found appealing.

“Consumer brands are what we touch, feel, smell and taste every day,” he said. “Our investors understand the growth potential in the model, but they also want to be part of the journey.”

The fund’s rapid progress towards its fundraising target comes amid growing recognition that celebrity influence, when combined with strong commercial execution and scalable business models, can create significant enterprise value.

With several high-profile celebrity-founded businesses generating billion-dollar exits in recent years, supporters of the strategy believe the opportunity remains in its early stages.

Meet The Chatbots That Might Manage Your Money One Day

More proactive and personalized bots could aid your investment decisions in real-time.

With US$40 million already committed, the Global Talent Fund is attracting investor attention with a strategy focused on building globally scalable consumer brands alongside high-profile talent.