I keep asking K about what all this progress in AI means for our business. It feels like we’re at the very beginning of a massive shift in how financial services will work.
At some point, I think all of it: investing, trading, banking, payments, will happen through custom AI-powered apps built by users themselves.
In that world, what’s the role of a broker? Likely, we get reduced to just being the “pipes” connecting users to exchanges and back-office systems. The only way to stay relevant is to make sure we’re the best pipe: fast, efficient, reliable, and invisible when it matters.
That’s why over the years, K and the tech team have been obsessively making our APIs faster, more scalable, and future-ready. Even if these improvements don’t immediately change a customer’s trading or reporting experience, we’ve chosen to fix every possible bottleneck today, not later.
- Tools like ChatGPT and Claude make it clear this shift isn’t an if but a when. It might take a year or a decade, but it’s inevitable. Human advisors will still have a role, mainly to help people stick to what these tools recommend.
- As for how things will evolve, the answer is grey. No one knows. Our approach: stay curious, watch for trends, and act where it makes sense. For example, we’ve intentionally held back on enabling AI-driven order placement.
In a future where everything is automated, trust and infrastructure will be our only real moats.