"AI and Investments: BPER's Strategy to Combat Uncertainty and Emotional Choices"

"MINIMIZE customers' emotional choices and guide them toward medium-term investments by maximizing the many potentials of artificial intelligence ." Grazia Orlandini (pictured), Head of Investment Strategy at BPER Banca Private Cesare Ponti, explains the bank's strategies in this complex moment where geopolitical uncertainties reign supreme.

We live in an era marked by significant uncertainty. What investment solutions and strategies are you developing to meet the new needs and expectations of high-net-worth clients?

In recent years, we have faced complex and diverse challenges, in a context marked by economic uncertainty, persistent inflation, restrictive monetary policies, and geopolitical tensions. In this environment, our guiding principle continues to be careful planning, which allows us and our clients to maintain a focus on medium-term objectives. Market volatility often leads investors to adopt a more conservative approach, which risks neglecting the necessary protection of the real value of their assets against inflation. For this reason, we have developed, also thanks to collaboration with leading asset managers, advanced investment solutions designed to diversify investments and reduce the impact of clients' emotional choices. These solutions help them instead maintain a planned, rational investment path consistent with their medium- to long-term objectives, even in times of significant uncertainty.

In recent years, the profile of the private client has evolved, partly due to generational change and digitalization. How would you describe today's high-end client? What investment demands are emerging most clearly?

Defining a unique client profile is always challenging. What's clear, however, is that the vast availability and immediate access to information means we're meeting increasingly informed, demanding, and engaged clients. They require a high level of customization, greater participation in decision-making, and a consistent relationship with their advisors. For this reason, we've gradually expanded our offerings, focusing primarily on personalization. We see this in our portfolio management services, which are characterized by great flexibility and high levels of customization, with modular solutions and options that allow clients to influence key aspects of management, such as asset class selection or benchmark selection. We also see this in our advisory service, with an Advanced Consulting service, also structured into various modules and support options. This service, based on the client's needs, allows us to activate specific services for the financial component alone.

When it comes to wealth management, what are the top priorities for high-net-worth clients today? And how do you approach choosing investment strategies for these clients?

When we meet clients with significant assets, their needs can be extremely diverse. The larger and more complex the assets, the greater the need for personalization and truly tailored services. Alongside financial assets, often spread across multiple clients, there is also non-financial wealth, including real estate, illiquid assets, and valuable collections. Furthermore, beyond the specific composition of the assets, family structures and all the current and future financial balances that must be preserved over time must also be considered. Therefore, when we address financial investment strategies, our goal is not to think in silos, but to ensure that these strategies are always integrated with a broader vision of wealth management, including the issues of protection, continuity, and future transmission. To this end, we work closely with all the bank's professionals specializing in these areas, to ensure a synergistic and long-term approach, in the client's best interest.

Artificial intelligence is also entering the world of wealth management, both as a decision support tool and in portfolio construction. How are you integrating these technologies into your private banking offering, and what added value can they offer high-end clients, while maintaining the human, advisory touch that remains central to this segment?

Today, artificial intelligence is revolutionizing the world of investments, improving both wealth management and the ability to communicate with clients. However, AI can never replace the critical judgment of an experienced investor, always attentive to identifying similarities and differences from similar situations in the past. Financial markets continue to be complex systems, therefore critical and non-systematic analysis remains crucial. On the client side too, the use of data, algorithms, and artificial intelligence is opening up new perspectives, making services increasingly responsive and personalized. At the BPER Group, we are investing heavily in this direction, both to support more robust investment decisions and to control risk within client portfolios. It is no coincidence that we were among the very first users of the Blackrock Aladdin platform for analyzing and supervising client financial portfolios.