The economics of serving more investors

Investment AI could help Gulf financial institutions extend personalised wealth services to more investors.
Gaby Diamant examines how lower research and monitoring costs could give advisors greater capacity to serve clients.
He argues that lasting growth will depend on timely guidance, service quality and stronger client relationships.

[For more news, click here]

Across the Gulf, personalised wealth management has largely been organised around a relatively small number of high-net-worth clients. The reason is mainly economic: research, portfolio monitoring and ongoing guidance require sustained professional attention, and the cost of that attention has set the level of wealth at which a bank or wealth manager can justify offering individual support.

That threshold excludes a large and growing group of investors, and the UAE shows the scale of it clearly. Boston Consulting Group’s Global Wealth Report 2026, published in October 2026, counts roughly 500,000 affluent individuals in the country, against about 200,000 with wealth between $1 million and $20 million, and forecasts that UAE net wealth will rise from $3.6 trillion in 2025 to $6 trillion by 2030. New investors also continue to arrive in the local markets, with the Dubai Financial Market registering 42,864 in the first half of 2026 and the Abu Dhabi Securities Exchange more than 30,000 over the same period. Many of these investors hold portfolios of listed shares and want to understand them, yet they sit below the level at which a conventional advisory model can serve them profitably.

Artificial intelligence applied to monitoring, analysis and advisor support could change that calculation.In a separate paper on how AI is changing the wealth management business model, published in May 2026, BCG estimates that 60 to 70% of advisory sub-activities can be driven or augmented by AI, and that financial planning and portfolio management, which account for 25 to 30% of costs and time in many operating models, are among the areas where costs are likely to fall most. If the recurring work of tracking holdings, reading company announcements and preparing reviews becomes far cheaper to carry out, the minimum portfolio size at which personalised support makes commercial sense falls with it.

The size of that opportunity should be weighed carefully. Lower delivery costs matter only if the service is designed around how these clients invest and what they ask of their institution, and BCG itself cautions that standardised advice for the mass affluent is likely to face sustained fee pressure. The commercial case therefore rests on the quality of the experience as much as on the savings.

That experience is shaped largely by what happens between transactions. In building investment solutions for banks and wealth managers, we have found that many of the questions investors have arise on an ongoing basis: why a position has moved, what a company announcement means for their holdings, or which developments deserve their attention. Most of those questions currently go unanswered, or are answered by a generic LLM, a social media feed or a messaging group, none of which knows what the investor owns. An institution that can answer them clearly, within the platform the customer already uses, gives them a reason to return between trades, and that may matter as much to the relationship as the cost of dealing.

For wealth managers, the more immediate question is how advisors spend their time. In a May 2026 analysis of agentic AI in wealth management, Deloitte’s Center for Financial Services estimates that roughly 70% of a US advisor’s time goes to work behind the scenes, and that 25 to 50% of that time could be freed from lower-value operational tasks. Firms in the United States are already planning around the extra capacity. A Cerulli Associates study conducted with Vista Equity Partners, published in September 2026, found that 73% of firms plan to add junior advisors over the next two years, with AI used to expand the service capacity of the business.

The division of work between software and advisors is becoming clearer. Technology can carry much of the monitoring and analysis, while advisors keep the time needed to understand a client’s circumstances, discuss objectives and review proposed actions. Deloitte describes a similar model, in which AI handles routine tasks and brings in the advisor when judgement or a client conversation is needed, with the advisor remaining the face of the firm. BCG estimates that AI could extend the number of relationships an advisor can maintain by 20 to 30%. The test for Gulf institutions is whether that additional capacity allows advisors to serve more clients while maintaining the quality of each relationship.

The final link is between service quality and institutional growth, and the relationship strengthens when the institution reaches out first. With investment -specific, specialized AI working in the background, an advisor can let a client know promptly when a development affects one of their holdings, or propose switching from one position to another with the reasoning set out clearly, so the client can see why the change suits their portfolio. An investor who receives that kind of timely, well-explained attention is more likely to keep assets with the institution and to consider its other services. That loyalty cannot be taken for granted in the region: EY found that 36% of wealthy clients in the GCC plan to change their primary wealth provider within three years, and that 71% expect wealth managers to use AI in delivering their service.

Retention, assets held and demand for additional services should be measured against the cost of providing the experience, and they will depend both on how well the service is designed and delivered and on the quality of the technology itself. Institutions that use AI to reach investors they could not previously serve, and to remain useful to them between transactions, will be well placed to grow alongside the region’s investor base. Widening the market and deepening client relationships are, in the end, the same opportunity seen from two sides.

Contributed by: Gaby Diamant, CEO and Co-founder, BridgeWise

Gaby Diamant is the CEO and Co-founder of BridgeWise. With over 15 years of experience in product development, financial management, and executive leadership, he has founded multiple companies and led them through growth and innovation.