The digital wealth advisor from Quirin Privatbank and quirion helps investors build wealth. We explain what Q.Ai can do and how we taught it.
What is an ETF? What are the pros and cons of stocks? How does an instant-access savings account work? Of course you can ask Q.Ai, the new AI bot from Quirin Privatbank, questions like these. The answers come promptly.
But Q.Ai was trained especially for other kinds of questions. How can I provide for my retirement? How do I build up wealth so that, in a few years' time, I can fulfil a big wish, such as a home of my own or a special car? Q.Ai is meant to show you how to move closer to goals like these by investing in the capital markets, and how to assess the risks correctly.
For that, it isn't enough to piece together quick answers from some web content or other. And that's why the chatbot keeps asking follow-up questions. The dialogue with users takes centre stage.
This makes Q.Ai Germany's first digital wealth advisor. The “Q” stands for Quirin Privatbank and quirion, “Ai” for “Artificial Intelligence”. The advisor is freely accessible to everyone and can be used free of charge. “We want to convey sound financial knowledge for smarter investing, not sell financial products,” underlines Jonas Stuiber, the project lead for Q.Ai.
Smarter investing with AI
In wealth advice, the way it should work is that the goals, investment horizons and risk profiles of investors take centre stage. But that isn't always the case. Very often, advisors are mainly concerned with getting particular products out the door. quirion and its parent company Quirin Privatbank have pushed back against this ever since they were founded. For both of them, product commissions play no role. Together, the two are now using artificial intelligence to make people in Germany better investors.
It took around 15 months from the idea to the launch of Q.Ai. The bot is based on a current GPT model (GPT-4o), like the one used by ChatGPT, for example. GPT is the abbreviation for “Generative Pre-trained Transformer”. “With these all-purpose language models, artificial intelligence has taken an enormous leap forward,” Stuiber notes. He himself gathered experience with an older generation of AI models a few years ago at a large French bank. “What's now possible with Q.Ai would have been unimaginable back then.”
Knowledge from capital market research
The database that Q.Ai draws on is enormous. It contains a great deal of expertise from quirion and Quirin Privatbank. After all, both of them base their investment strategy on the current state of financial market research. The dialogues also reflect know-how from Quirin Privatbank's many years of advisory practice. Beyond that, the chatbot also draws on content from the web, for example QuiPedia, developed by quirion. “But we've carefully filtered the information sources so that the answers are as well-founded as possible,” Stuiber explains.
Bringing the chatbot up to its current level of capabilities was a lot of work. “GPT models are a black box,” explains the business manager, who wrote his bachelor's thesis on the “impact of generative AI on robo-advisors”. “Especially in the first training phase, you never know quite exactly how and why the bot responds in a particular way.” It took a while and cost many hours of training before the results were satisfactory. “Part of that is making sure the answers are as easy to understand as possible, but not too simplistic.”
At the moment, interaction with the chatbot is still in writing. It's conceivable that at some point you'll be able to talk to Q.Ai in natural language. Q.Ai doesn't provide current prices or stock market news. Perhaps that will change in the future too. But it isn't a priority. “Smart wealth-building should be guided by investors' goals, time horizons and risk profiles,” Stuiber emphasises. “And not by short-term price movements or hot stock tips.”
