Fordel StudiosAI Query Assistant for Wealth Management
This case study describes a real engagement. Client identity, proprietary details, and specific metrics are anonymized or approximated under NDA.
What needed
solving
Advisory team spending 40% of working hours on routine portfolio queries. Average response time exceeded 4 hours for simple questions about balance, document status, and fee breakdowns — creating unnecessary friction in the client relationship.
The primary constraint was regulatory: every response template had to pass legal review before deployment, and the system required guardrails that could not be bypassed by client prompting. The portfolio management backend was a legacy on-premise system with no API layer, requiring a custom sync pipeline to make live data available to the assistant. A zero-downtime requirement was non-negotiable — the portal serves clients globally across time zones. False escalation rates also needed to stay low; excessive escalation would simply shift the advisor load rather than reduce it.
How we
built it
- 01
Mapped every query type the advisory team received over a 90-day sample period, categorising by frequency, complexity, and compliance risk. Defined automated-eligible versus escalation-required query classes before writing any code.
- 02
Built a retrieval layer over portfolio data, document storage, and fee schedules — grounding every response in the client's actual account state rather than generating from general knowledge.
- 03
Designed compliance guardrails as explicit filters: every response category went through legal review before deployment, and the system was configured to escalate any query touching advice, predictions, or regulatory disclosure.
- 04
Deployed with a staged rollout: 10% of queries through the AI system with full advisor visibility, expanding to 80% after two weeks of monitored performance with zero compliance flags.
This engagement focused on eliminating the mechanical query load from an advisory team without introducing compliance risk. The system was scoped around the 200 most common client questions, classified by regulatory sensitivity, and built with hard guardrails that prevent the assistant from making recommendations or presenting data in advisory-adjacent framing. Delivery was structured in two phases: pipeline and model integration in weeks 1–6, followed by compliance review and phased rollout in weeks 7–8. The assistant was embedded into the existing client portal with zero downtime deployment via feature flag.
What we
delivered
Domain-trained AI assistant with real-time portfolio data access, compliance guardrails, and automated escalation to human advisors for queries requiring judgment.
Measurable
outcomes
- 68% of incoming queries now resolved without advisor involvement — freeing roughly 3.5 hours per advisor per day for higher-value client engagement.
- Average response time for routine queries dropped from 4+ hours to under 30 seconds, measurably improving client satisfaction scores in the quarter after launch.
- Advisor throughput on complex planning work increased 3.2× as routine query load was systematically removed from their day.
“The query volume our advisors were handling manually dropped within the first month. The system handles the routine questions correctly, escalates when it should, and our compliance team signed off on every response template before it went live.”
— Head of Advisory Operations, Wealth Management FirmReady to build
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