Why AI Is Critical to Wealth Management: Q&A with Vestmark’s Leo Schrantz

Can you tell us about your recent promotion and your vision for Vestmark’s future? 

Innovation is core to what Vestmark does, both internally and externally. AI is clearly a critical technology for innovation, whether it’s putting it into our products or enhancing our client service or making our coders more efficient. The challenge for an organization is that when something is part of everybody’s job, it might end up as no one’s responsibility. We want to make sure we understand how AI is being used throughout the company, how it’s working, and how it could be applied in other areas. That’s really where this role and this title came from – to have someone own responsibility for ensuring AI is used effectively and to its potential across the firm while removing barriers and blockers for people who want to use AI. 

How does this compare with how AI is managed elsewhere? This isn’t a common title.

Well, having a certain position or title in an organization doesn’t tell you whether a firm is doing a good job with AI, although it does show that it’s an area of importance or focus. We are seeing more firms create this role, for what it’s worth. What it means to Vestmark is that AI is a part of our everyday life. Some companies put AI off on an island in an innovation lab or center of excellence, where they try to create AI tools from scratch and then hand them off to other teams for implementation. They’re dabbling, and that’s not a bad place to start, but it won’t generate the kinds of results that I think a lot of firms are expecting from AI. 

What are some of the biggest challenges in bringing AI to wealth management? 

It’s sort of like that classic book, “The Innovator’s Dilemma.” It’s fine to listen to customers’ wants and needs and then build product roadmaps around that – that is critical to success for anyone in any business. But we have an opportunity with AI to go further. I really don’t think most wealth managers are clamoring for something like agentic AI – they probably don’t know what it could do for them, and that’s OK, because that’s not their job to know what the latest and greatest advances in AI are. That’s our job as a technology provider – to figure that out and bring it to our users. We want to have everyone at Vestmark thinking about and working with AI, and we want to get to a place where we both solve customers’ needs today and also show them new solutions powered by AI they didn’t even know to ask for. 

What do you think they aren’t asking for yet?

Most of the AI story being told in wealth management now is about how AI will do the mundane tasks and let advisors spend more time with clients. To me, the promise is not just about improving efficiency — though that’s definitely a real factor — but about unlocking new capabilities. We like to pose the question to people – if you had 100 capable users of your platform at your command, fully capable of doing anything you ask … what would you ask them to do? Sure, you could ask them to do some routine things for you to save a little time in your day, but that kind of power unlocks whole new levels of service potential for advisors and their clients. At Vestmark, we’re looking at how AI can help individual advisors tap the full power of our account management tools, which were originally designed for expert users at the home office. There’s so much potential.

How does your background prepare you for this role?

Immediately before Vestmark, I was a management consultant for Bain & Company. I’m not a finance person at heart, or a tech person, although I do have experience in both – in fact, in college I worked at my aunt’s wealth management firm in Pittsburgh. After I graduated, I was with Accenture in the Federal Services group, doing predictive analysis with federal government agencies using a very early neural network-based text analytics platform. What I bring is the ability to see how technology and innovation, particularly AI, can influence Vestmark’s strategy, operations, organizational design and more, to improve how we serve our customers.

What are your thoughts about the next five years in this industry? 

This is just a very interesting and exciting space. Fintech is interesting in general, but wealth tech in particular is exciting because I think there is a lot of opportunity for disruption. There's a lot of established wealth management players who have been around for a long time, but also up-and-comers looking to grow fast who are willing to try something new to gain an edge. Vestmark is in a sweet spot to support them all. We have an established brand, but also the type of institutional culture and pedigree, to be that disruptive player in wealthtech. I'm excited to be here for that ride.