I Was Amused by Muse. Wealth Managers Shouldn’t Be

Two weeks ago, The Wall Street Journal attributed a sell-off in financial services stocks, specifically wealth management companies like Schwab and LPL, to Meta’s Muse AI. At first, I laughed. There’s no way Meta would become a major technology provider to the wealth management industry, I thought.

But my opinion changed recently.

Just to set the stage, I’m not an active Facebook user. I technically have an account, but the app has long been removed from my phone. I’ve probably used Instagram for no more than five minutes in my entire life.

But with a Boston nor’easter keeping me indoors, I decided to play around with Muse. And that’s when it clicked.

Traditional chatbots like ChatGPT and Claude present you with a blank page. It’s up to the consumer, or professional, to figure out what they can and cannot do. Ironically, that creates friction with adoption because people don’t know what to ask.

Muse takes a different approach.

Out of the gate, Muse, which I named Ziggy, just wants to do stuff for you. It doesn’t give you a clean, blank page and ask you to conjure up a question. It throws dozens of little value propositions at you. “Hey, let me make a dinner reservation.” “Let me find you a better price on those shoes.”

You don’t need to understand what AI can and can’t do. There’s almost no learning curve. As you get pummeled with things it can do for you, it’s easy to say, “Ooh, let me give that a try.”

The way Muse does the work in the background and then shoots you a notification when it’s done also works extremely well. It feels less like a chatbot and more like a task manager.

And this is where it clicked for me.

I still don’t see Meta Muse becoming a tool for financial advisors. But I can absolutely see it becoming a tool for individual investors, a.k.a. Meta’s massive consumer base, to use to automate pieces of their finances themselves.

Take my parents. They’re in their 70s and, unlike me, actually use Facebook. Whenever I talk to them about their finances, I hear two things:

Mom is laddering CDs and sometimes bonds.

Neither is particularly complex. It’s just manual and mechanical.

Could I see Muse one day saying to my mom, “Hey, I can automate that bond ladder for you,” and her saying, yes?

Eh. Actually … maybe I could.

Wealth management isn’t cheap. Customer acquisition costs are high. Client fees are high. Service expectations are high, which means the cost to provide that service is equally high.

Mass-market wealth management has always struggled with this equation. It’s hard to profitably acquire and service smaller accounts with a traditional wealth management model.

And that’s what intrigues me about Meta.

There are an estimated 50 million Facebook users aged 60 or older who are already actively using the service. How hard would it be for Meta, through Muse, to start offering simple micro-wealth solutions to that audience?

Not a financial plan. Not a full-service wealth offering. Not “replace your financial advisor.”

Just like Meta wants to inject itself into your life as a personal shopper, maybe it eventually injects itself as your personal “bond ladder manager.”

Then look at Meta’s other successful consumer demographic. Instagram.

That’s another enormous captive audience, much of it largely unserved by the traditional wealth management industry, to which Meta has direct, incredibly cheap access to consumers.

So, maybe the WSJ story wasn’t quite as crazy as I first thought. (It seems not to be, since OpenAI came out with their version of Muse, Dot.)

The financial services disruption from Meta may eventually be real. I just don’t think it looks like Meta competing directly with Schwab, LPL or financial advisors.

It looks more like Meta making DIY financial management dramatically easier. That, of course, poses a larger problem: If DIY is easy, accessible and effective, how many people actually need a wealth manager?

Time will tell, but the wealth management industry should see this as a warning sign. If firms aren’t investing in tools and technology that improve the user experience and allow advisors to demonstrate value, they may cut them loose and go with their own version of Ziggy.