JPMorgan May Disrupt Financial Advisors’ Market With Its AI-Based IndexGPT Spectacle

JPMorgan could be the first financial services company that builds a GPT-like product directly for its customers, said Washington D.C.-based trademark attorney Josh Gerben.

New Delhi: Financial services giant JPMorgan Chase is developing an Artificial Intelligence-based ChatGPT-like software service to select investments for customers, reported CNBC. The American multinational giant has applied to trademark a product called IndexGPT this month, the report mentions a filing from the New York-based bank.

IndexGPT will tap “cloud computing software using artificial intelligence” for “analyzing and selecting securities tailored to customer needs,” the filing said.

Industries across the world have considered the use of artificial intelligence following the dramatic success of OpenAI’s ChatGPT technology. Tech giants and chipmakers have joined the race to build the foundation for the next-generation’s technological spectacle.

How AI Can Transform The Finance Industry?

Artificial intelligence has a wide range of possibilities in the finance sector. As per CNBC, banks including Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley have already begun testing it for internal use. The testing includes ways to help Goldman engineers create code or answer Morgan Stanley financial advisors’ queries, the report added.

JPMorgan could be the first financial services company that builds a GPT-like product directly for its customers, the report quotes Washington D.C.-based trademark attorney Josh Gerben.

“This is a real indication they might have a potential product to launch in the near future,” Gerben said.

“Companies like JPMorgan don’t just file trademarks for the fun of it,” he said. The filing includes “a sworn statement from a corporate officer essentially saying, ‘Yes, we plan on using this trademark.’”

According to Gerber, JPMorgan must launch IndexGPT within about three years of approval to secure the trademark. He also added that trademarks typically take nearly a year to be approved owing to the backlogs at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

Even though Gerben said that the applications are typically vaguely written to give companies the broadest possible protections, as per the report, JPMorgan’s filing does specify that IndexGPT uses the same flavor of A.I. popularised by ChatGPT; the bank plans to use A.I. powered by “Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) models,” the report mentioned.

“It’s an A.I. program to select financial securities,” Gerben said. “This sounds to me like they’re trying to put my financial advisor out of business.”

Disruption In The Financial Advisors’ Job Market?

The emergence of artificial intelligence has already ignited fears among several working professionals who consider it to be the death knell for their replacement in the market.

Even though wealth management firms such as Morgan Stanley and Bank of America’s Merrill offer simple roboadvisor services, they haven’t stopped their human advisors from gathering billions of dollars more in assets.

Executives at JPMorgan, earlier this week, touted their progress in applying A.I. across operations at the company’s annual investor conference.

The Chief Information Officer at JPMorgan, Lori Beer, has said that the bank, which employs 1,500 data scientists and machine-learning engineers, is testing “a number of use cases” for GPT technology.

“We couldn’t discuss A.I. without mentioning GPT and large language models,” Beer said. “We’ve recognized the power and opportunity of these tools and are committed to exploring all the ways they can deliver value for the firm.”