Anthropic’s latest move — agent templates for various finance and client coverage functions — is part of a broader trend toward more intelligent, largely autonomous, and context-aware multiagent systems that are redefining the financial services industry’s digital operating models. By right, Anthropic is just following its growth playbook by creating industry-grade applications it can “sell” to customers in as many sectors as possible (e.g., healthcare, life sciences, defense).
We should not underestimate, however, the impact that such actions are having on the SaaS and PaaS vendors serving the banking and wealth management industry. Not surprisingly, most of the digital wealth management platforms (DWMPs) we’ve surveyed for our upcoming Forrester landscape report indicated intelligent automation and agentic AI as top potential disruptors. The only surprise: The disruption has already arrived!
In just one week, Anthropic launched a $1.5 billion joint venture with several Wall Street firms and signed a partnership with FIS to push out Claude to the wider financial services market. What makes the FIS tie-up particularly interesting is that it grants Anthropic’s engineers the access to super-valuable domain-specific data to train agents, leveraging FIS’s system of records, transactions, payments, deposits, credit, and customer activity across thousands of financial services firms worldwide. This instantly ups the stakes for any software and platform vendor in this space, DWMPs included.
DWMP Vendors Must Define And Defend Their Role In An Agentic AI World
For DWMP vendors, the strategic question is no longer whether to add AI or not. It’s where they fit within an agentic operating model and, critically, what they can uniquely own when third-party agents such as Claude operate across clients’ enterprise systems, data, and tools.
Before Anthropic joined the party, DWMPs had a durable advantage. Their key differentiation, and a barrier to monoline fintechs, came from deep domain expertise and vast datasets. Large volumes of on-platform assets under management, transactions, and customer activity enabled them to build valuable ontologies as ingredients for industry-grade solutions, private AI models, and, yes, agentic AI. Remove those barriers, and DWMPs become vulnerable to AI accelerators and scalers, which brings me to conclude that DWMP vendors should:
Accelerate the development of owned agentic systems and governance.
Prepare to partner and integrate with third-party agents that connect to enterprise data, processes, and workflows.
Set up agentic pricing models, tiers, and bundles, and test pricing levels to compete with “AI natives” such as Anthropic, OpenAI, and Microsoft Copilot.
Use The AI-Offering Pricing and Packaging Framework to develop an appropriate pricing approach for AI solutions.
Refer to the blog, Four Forces Shape The Future Of Technology Services, to understand the buyer shift and frame a strategic response.
Upcoming Research
My upcoming Forrester landscape report will provide an overview of DWMP market dynamics, key trends, business value drivers, and the top emerging use cases and capabilities of 23 DWMP vendors.
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