Safra CEO says Saxo deal shows need for tech scale in AI era

By Ariane Luthi and Oliver Hirt

ZURICH, March 2 (Reuters) - J. Safra Sarasin's acquisition of Denmark's Saxo Bank, which has a integer trading and concern platform, reflects wealthiness managers' ‌need to put much successful exertion arsenic AI threatens to shingle up the business, ‌the Swiss backstage bank's CEO told Reuters.

Safra completed connected Monday its acquisition of a 70% involvement successful Saxo successful a ​deal worthy astir 1.1 cardinal euro ($1.30 billion).

"Saxo is each astir the exertion architecture," J. Safra Sarasin's CEO Daniel Belfer said. "It's each astir the agility to marque changes that are coming to the marketplace and adapting to lawsuit demands quickly."

Shares of wealthiness managers tumbled successful February arsenic investors disquieted that caller AI tools ‌could harm their concern exemplary ⁠by undercutting request for fiscal advice.

AI laboratory Anthropic past week unveiled caller ways for businesses to usage its plug-ins successful their work, including for wealth-management tasks ⁠such arsenic portfolio analysis. That followed start-up Altruist introducing AI-enabled taxation readying features.

The AI translation is apt to displacement banks' return-on-investment calculus toward investing successful frontier technology, alternatively than relying connected the aged playbook of acquiring ​wealth managers ​to grow their lawsuit base, said Christian Edelmann, a ​banking adept astatine consultancy Oliver Wyman.

J. ‌Safra Sarasin is inactive looking astatine accepted acquisitions, but with Saxo Bank, tech was the main factor, Belfer said.

"AI volition beryllium everywhere," helium added. "You volition inactive person people, but you'll beryllium capable to springiness a batch much item to the lawsuit connected their account."

Belfer volition go CEO of Saxo arsenic good pursuing the merger, replacing Kim Fournais who volition measurement down and seat the Danish bank's ‌board of directors, Saxo said connected Monday.

Generative AI is ​already enabling hyper-personalised services, making historically uneconomic segments cheaper to ​serve portion boosting advisor productivity successful higher-wealth ​segments, Edelmann astatine Oliver Wyman said.

"We're moving towards automated workflows with quality oversight," ‌he said. "In 3 years, radical successful the ​workforce volition nary longer ​be doing what they are doing today."

American outgo steadfast Block said past week it would chopped astir fractional its workforce arsenic portion of an overhaul to embed AI crossed its ​operations.

Banks crossed Europe person been expanding ‌into wealthiness absorption to turn interest income. Britain's NatWest this period announced a 2.7 ​billion lb woody to bargain Evelyn Partners.