A vision of how your personal finance might be managed in 20 years’ time!

We are in 2036, you are now at the end of your professional career and cash rich after years spent reimbursing your house and other investments. You are wondering how you could invest your new cash flows.

You log onto a global investment information platform in order to search for the mix of investment vehicles you would like to invest in.

Now that there is a universal format for the Key Investor Information Document, it is easy to scroll through the range of funds available for your profile. The platform selects automatically what is most suitable for you given your investment history, political opinions, spending patterns, those of your network and family and your life expectancy (also assessed automatically through the tracking of medical records, nutrition and physical activity levels). The tool comes up with a mix of local funds registered in Vietnam, Italy and Iran. A sophisticated machine translation software allows you to translate in English all the literature related to those investments vehicles. You decide to select funds that invest specifically in the insect farming industry which has developed a lot in the twenties (2020s).

You then switch onto an investment advisory platform, you subscribed to it recently because it uses sophisticated AI algorithms to predict the evolution of any investments mix given numerous micro and macro-economic scenario you can choose upfront.

This platform is also used by your Independent Financial Advisor and he helps you to run several scenarios for 3 funds you had previously selected. You have to pay for his assistance but the tool is so sophisticated that this is not wasted money, you can select several hundred parameters for the scenario you use to compare the 3 funds. You’ve had long debates about the name of the future US president you thought would win the election as it has a major influence on the scenario.

In the end, you chose to invest in a local Persian fund. The “Know your Client” process was immediate as you were already registered on the Global Fund investor block chain. You invested in the share class in bitcoins so that you could avoid any foreign exchange issue, you could proceed to the payment by bringing your eyes closer to the screen for a quick iris scan. The global Fund register block chain was updated and you were then a proud owner of a new investment.

The investment process applied by the investment house you selected in Iran relies on a heavy usage of artificial intelligence.

They have access to all research work not only for big corporations but also for small companies and even start-ups. Linguistic technologies are used for translation and sentiment analysis and also to manage efficiently the huge amount of data available. The portfolio managers are responsible for the choice of the data sources and the mathematical models used to establish automatically the investment lists. The fund is diversified and invests in equities but also lends directly through crowd lending platforms. This asset management company has adopted the new fee standards and charges only performance fees as they are very confident with their investment models.

Several months later, as you are travelling in your self-driving electric car to go and visit your recently born new grandchild, you were pinged by the Persian asset manager who asked if you wanted to check how your investment was doing.

Reporting is done on a rolling monthly basis on demand, and, as it was the 23^rd of May, you could ask questions to the automated interface on what happened since the 23^rd of April. The car screen could display the standard performance indicators that are now the same across all investment houses worldwide but you could ask many detailed questions verbally to the investment reporting robot. Your German relative who was in the car tried to stretch the robot by asking in German what had been the impact of the recent interest rate increase on a specific security in the portfolio and was surprised to be directly answered in German and also to be given prospective view on the matter.

You both commented that the numerous MOOC and online courses about investments that had been developed in the past 15 years had strongly contributed to convert the general public into more savvy investors. The investment houses had really also raised their games in order to be able to answer more and more sophisticated questions while being able to invest in almost all type of imaginable assets for their clients.

It is good to finally be in a world where finance has found its place and where savings can be properly channeled to finance job generating investments and growth.

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