Retail Investing Opens Up to AI Assistants

Scalable Capital made history by becoming the first European bank to allow artificial intelligence assistants direct access to customers' investment accounts, launching its Agentic Investing feature on August 25. This cutting-edge service enables ChatGPT, Claude, or Grok to interact with real brokerage accounts managed by Scalable Capital, which holds over €60 billion for more than 1 million clients.

The AI assistant can perform a range of tasks, including analyzing a customer’s portfolio, comparing it to benchmarks, creating savings plans, and adjusting limit orders, all through simple, plain-language prompts. However, every trade and savings plan still requires the customer's explicit approval before execution, and deposits and withdrawals remain limited to Scalable Capital’s own app and website.

Erik Podzuweit, co-CEO of Scalable Capital, acknowledged that some customers may be hesitant to entrust AI with managing their portfolios, positioning this launch as a first step towards more extensive AI integration within Scalable’s platform. In the United States, various brokerage firms are pursuing similar objectives using different approaches.

Robinhood introduced Agentic Trading and an Agentic Credit Card on May 27, allowing an external AI agent to connect to a dedicated sub-account with its own budget and execute trades. CEO Vlad Tenev emphasized that the company’s mission to democratize finance for all now extends to AI agents. Interactive Brokers adopted a narrower strategy with Ask IBKR, an AI tool designed to answer clients' portfolio-related questions without generating trading instructions or linking to an external model like Claude or ChatGPT.

Public, the first brokerage to introduce AI agents for investing, allows customers to set automatic trades, cash movements, and risk management through standing instructions in their app. Moreover, Public enables customers to connect Claude Desktop directly to their brokerage accounts using the Model Context Protocol, which Scalable Capital and Robinhood also employ.

This protocol facilitates direct connections between external AI systems and brokerage platforms. These financial institutions are targeting power users—those who use AI to execute 27 or more distinct tasks per month, constituting 10% of all consumers and 19% of millennials. While mainstream users average around eight tasks monthly, focusing on lower-complexity activities, power users have become increasingly reliant on AI, with 75% using it for at least a year.

Scalable Capital, Robinhood, Interactive Brokers, and Public are all striving to serve this tech-savvy demographic, which has shifted from occasional AI use in stock research to integrating AI into their regular financial routines.