Advisers took part in an ethical dilemmas workshop at the CISI Financial Planning conference today, where they discussed how technological advancements can cause firms to be placed in difficult positions.
Hosted by Amrita Bhogal, professional standards and ethics manager at the CISI, advisers were taken through four scenarios and asked to vote on which solution to the dilemma they would go for, out of four answers.
First scenario
The first dilemma talked about a lady called Jane Doe who had been a client service administrator for five years at a medium sized financial planning firm.
Her role entailed a range of things including booking appointments and sending emails to clients with many of them coming to trust and rely on Jane.
She decided to depart from the firm however it could not afford to hire another person and was recommended by a member of operations to use a fully-automated system with a chatbot function.
The board decided to name the chatbot Jane with a picture of the human Jane added to the chat function so that clients would not be able to tell the difference and it learnt Jane's tone to make the transition “seamless”.
A few months after Jane's departure, numerous complaints were received by Alfie, head of client services, with clients complaining that Jane was unreliable and wanted disciplinary action sought against her.
Company policy of the firm entails complaints about staff members to be passed on to the regulator.
However, none were reported to the regulator because the chatbot Jane is an automated service and therefore it was not required to report this.
Advisers were asked what the chair of the board should recommend, with 91 per cent voting that clients should be informed about the chatbot, and the website updated reflecting this, and all complaints logged and recorded.
In response to the dilemma, one adviser said: “There is not enough transparency with actually identifying between the human and the chatbot function.”
Another adviser added: “Option C is the only option that says the website is going to be updated, so that clients in the future know they are dealing with a chatbot, rather than an individual. The other responses do not address the issues that clients should have been told they were not talking to the human Jane.”
Bhogal highlighted the importance for firms to be open and transparent with clients about the technology they were using given the rate that technological advancements were moving at.
Second scenario
In another ethical dilemma, advisers explored a hypothetical firm, named Greys Financial, that invested in third party AI software to automate and personalise financial recommendations for their clients.
The firm operates from two branches, one was situated in a metropolis while the other was in a small town that mostly catered to the local community.
The AI software required all client data to be inputted like postcodes, social media handles and healthcare needs.
