Meet the Company Talking Big About Using AI to Render Private Wealth Managers Obsolete

Like many of AI’s biggest evangelists, Fahad Hassan believes the technology will transform entire industries, albeit with one distinction: Whereas other CEOs hope for a wave of so-called AI agents to reinvent areas like sales, Hassan is confident that bots will descend on the private wealth management space and irrevocably change the industry’s makeup. With that bullishness comes a grim prediction about the future employment of Certified Private Wealth Managers. “I tell them their job will not exist in the next five to ten years,” Hassan says with a smile. After co-founding the Mclean, Virginia-based Range in 2021, Hassan has helped build an investment management company that seeks to automate an industry that grew for decades on a bedrock of human relationships. He and his co-founder David Cusatis have strong votes of confidence from investors, including Google’s AI-focused fund Gradient Ventures, which contributed $12 million in Range’s Series A round in 2023, and also participated in its $28 million Series B last November. Hassan says more fundraising is coming: “We’re getting inbounds every 24 hours from AI-based VCs and other investors. We’re probably going to do a megaround this fall or this winter to accelerate our growth.” VCs are banking on their shared vision, one which is pretty rampant across Silicon Valley: The technological tide is turning and AI is making the upending of old norms inevitable. For Range’s purposes, this means that people don’t need to be on a first-name basis with a wealth advisor to make money. Trips to the golf course to build relationships and talk about ETFs are fast becoming a relic, thanks to AI agents, which work around the clock. “Stock brokers are a really good example where people had traded millions of dollars on the phone and knew a person. And today, you don’t do that. You don’t even think about it,” Hassan argues. Stock brokers’ demise has been noted before, although they still exist, often just under different titles like wealth managers, or financial advisers. The biggest question hanging over Range’s gambit is whether a platform that seeks to grow people’s money through new technology can earn enough public trust to unseat major financial institutions. How will it be regulated? Perhaps lightly, if Big Tech’s incursion into the federal government provides a clue: Many of President Donald Trump’s prominent backers hail from the tech industry, including the venture capitalists Ben Horowitz and Marc Andressen, whose firm, Andreessen Horowitz, has been praising AI-driven investment strategies since 2023. Hassan says it’s “the Wild West.” For now, Range isn’t even offering AI tools for its clients, making Hassan’s promises of sweeping automation sound perhaps a little blustery. “We’re still in the very, very early days of what a good AI user experience looks like,” says Cusatis, a software engineer who holds the title of chief architect at Range. For now, Range provides three pricing tiers that start at $2,655 annually. Unlike other private investment managers, Range doesn’t bill based on a percentage of a client’s assets. So far, the company’s custom-built AI tools, which both founders say are built on existing major Large Language Models, are used by Range’s team of wealth advisors to help tailor strategies for clients’ needs. Range is targeting a mid-year release of its first client-facing AI programs, and plans to keep its human team of advisors intact. The company’s ambition to automate jobs out of existence doesn’t apply to its own teams: “Range will have wealth managers, and it will always be a service they provide, if people want it,” a spokesperson tells Inc. The cautionary period makes sense. Some of the splashier rollouts in commercial AI have had major hiccups. Google’s AI overhaul of search famously recommended glue on pizza, and had a rocky start in general. Self-driving vehicles have also crashed, prompting scrutiny from regulators. So the question remains: Why should people trust a similar technology with their most important financial decisions? Alejandro Lopez-Lira, a professor of finance at the University of Florida, has been experimenting with how Large Language Models can be put to this test. There are some advantages, he says, in that an application like ChatGPT can absorb and synthesize far more information than any human can. But when it comes to financial planning over a long period, can an AI account for all the unforeseen variables that might arise and affect your portfolio? “It’s extremely hard to test the performance of any of these AI [investment] strategies, because they have basically memorized the whole internet up until very, very recently,” Lopez-Lira says. ChatGPT, for instance, can synthesize immense data, but only to a point: “For the latest ChatGPT models, the cutoff date is 2024. So if you want to use that model, you only have less than one year to simulate the performance of the strategy,” he explains. There is also the question of regulating autonomous investments. Algorithmic trading, or buying and selling securities on an automated basis, is something hedge funds have done for years, regulated by the Securities and Exchange commission and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, a non-profit that issues certifications. But agentic AI in private wealth management is a new area that isn’t regulated yet. “It’s a little bit of a gray area, for sure,” Lopez-Lira says. Hassan claims that’s to Range’s advantage. “Our vision is to keep doing what we’re doing growing as fast as we’re growing, and candidly, lobby for the set of laws that will come around AIs giving you advice and what that looks like.” he says. BY SAM BLUM, @SAMMBLUM