PETALING JAYA: A good, competent financial planner can take years to master the intricacies of financial planning, investment strategies and wealth management.
Some begin their journey and find it too hard – leading them to quit the profession.
Whitman Holdings Bhd founder and managing director Yap Ming Hui said the courses needed to become a financial planner before registering with the Securities Commission can be challenging, as there is a vast amount of material to master, which also takes time.
To date, there are about 50 licensed financial planning companies and around 2,000 licensed financial planners.
On top of that, financial planners may not receive a fixed salary, so once their savings start diminishing, they may feel compelled to move on from the profession for fear of not being able to cope.
With that, Ming Hui said the firm’s subsidiary Whitman Independent Advisors Sdn Bhd launched AI YMH, a financial planning practice AI designed to help financial planning graduates and new advisers move from education and qualification to practical professional competency.
“If we can cut short the learning curve from, say, five years to about a year, then a person can start earning a meaningful income. We want to play a role in this, also because we’ve been in the industry for so many years,” he told StarBiz in an interview yesterday.
AI YMH was designed fully in-house and can be used as a tool to support the practice of holistic financial planning – which requires knowledge across retirement, investment, insurance, tax and estate planning.
Ming Hui explained that when meeting with clients, it’s not one answer that fits all.
“Every client is different, they have different needs and have different priorities. When planners meet them, sometimes they tend to need some extra help – especially if they’re just starting off.
“This is where AI YMH comes in, a planner can simply type in their questions and the tool will provide pointers and responses based on solid, true case experiences,” he said.
Currently, Whitman’s assets under advice stand at RM1.3bil.
Some of the questions that AI YMH could answer include how to think through a client’s situation, how to respond to the more difficult questions and how to avoid common mistakes in investing.
He said Whitman has its own set of principles and is strongly guided by them.
When asked how AI YMH differs from ChatGPT or even Claude, he said that, in general, most AI tools are designed to provide users with feel-good advice and positive experiences.
In the world of finance, this is not always the case.
“If you were to ask ChatGPT about investing in crypto, for example, you are bound to get a positive response.
“But at Whitman, the assistance and information we give our clients are controlled and based on facts,” Ming Hui pointed out.
The tool can also have information and data added into it, as Ming Hui said the market and global economies change quickly in today’s landscape.
“These days, we get many clients asking about AI (artificial intelligence), which is not something we saw before.
“So, our technical team is able to go into the tool and input information that a planner might need.
“A lot of it is based on our experiences, so the tool is not designed to remain static.”
For now, AI YMH is only available for Whitman’s financial planners, but Ming Hui is open to sharing it with the industry should philosophies align.
“The tool can be very useful to planners, but to use it, one must accept our values and ways of thinking. For example, we value transparency, or putting the client’s interests first and products later.
“What we don’t want is someone using the tool and pretending to be a professional,” Ming Hui said.
Together with the launch, Whitman announced Retirement Readiness, a corporate social responsibility initiative for individuals who do not have access to professional retirement planning and guidance.
The initiative will focus on individuals aged 50 to 60 who are still earning an active income.
Ming Hui said the team will start off with 120 cases annually, and will increase the number in the future.
“We are hopeful that as our financial advisers increase, we can commit to help more, maybe between 200 to 300 individuals. We will start in December this year,” he said.
