[AI agents are coming to financial firms to revitalize and modernize their middle office operations. For many firms, the middle office has become the single greatest drag on scale — and AI agents directly target this structural constraint. Weighed down by disconnected legacy systems, error-prone manual processes, and large personnel headcounts, middle office operations have long been a major bottleneck for asset management and wealth management firms.
Rather than replacing systems, the latest AI solutions are being engineered to work across them – streamlining workflows and enabling firms to adapt quickly to market and individualize client needs. Yet, it has given some business leaders pause since these AI solutions are arriving as an unusual manifestation of technology.
To get a better understanding of these AI agents and the issues involved, we reached out to Tom Van Horn, Chief Operating Officer of TIFIN AXIS – a productivity platform of AI agents designed to modernize financial services middle office operations by improving efficiency, reducing risk, and removing bottlenecks limiting growth.
Tom brings deep expertise in product, technology, and operations in wealth and asset management to this discussion. We asked him to share his knowledge and experiences on how the latest applications of AI technology are truly transforming the financial services industry.]
Tooth: Please help us conceptualize this. What is the function of a platform of AI agents and what does it look like?
Van Horn: First, it’s important to lay the groundwork that TIFIN has been implementing AI for workflows in the financial services industry for more than five years. There is a lot of fuss about AI and Agents, but what sets this technology apart is the ability to apply it intelligence do not just automate tasks within an operational layer. This intelligence enables reasoning and action within existing technology stacks and operational workflows without the need to replace or convert heavily embedded systems.
To achieve this operational upgrade, an AI agent platform includes technical tools and capabilities such as orchestrators, coordinators, Large Language Models (LLMs), computing models, calculators, and financial scenarios.
Tooth: How have you designed your AI agent platform to meet the needs of your financial customers?
Van Horn: Our talented engineers and dedicated experience in enabling this technology in production environments in the heavily regulated financial sector have accelerated the build and adoption of TIFIN’s agentic workflow application – the AXIS platform. This single-minded focus has driven us to build an intelligent agent of agents architecture that understands the financial services domain. This enables multiple deep and specialized workflows and reasoning tools that can be centrally coordinated. By using a rich ‘context engine’, situational awareness is possible for multiple agents working together. It functions much like an operations worker who coordinates with colleagues who touch multiple systems while completing a workflow.
An example of this is onboarding a new client at an RIA firm. To fully onboard a new customer, the company needs to touch five to ten pieces of technology that all play their role in facilitating financial services operations – from CRM, customer billing, financial planning, portfolio reporting, tax transition, model platforms, advisor compensation, risk assessment systems, and so on. These deeply embedded AI agent applications mean that something like TIFIN AXIS can unlock efficiencies by deploying a digital workforce that can navigate and reason through this fragmented technology layer.
Tooth: Can you tell us about some of your strategic partners who are helping to accelerate the buildout of your platform and how you work with them?
Van Horn: When tackling complex workflows and focusing on business outcomes for our customers, executing them with quality and speed, we must focus on our core competencies and collaborate where it makes sense. By leveraging out-of-the-box capabilities through best-in-class partners such as AWS, Palantir, and various small and large LLMs, we have an edge in building and refining a product that is domain-specific.
In the areas of wealth, investments and insurance, the workflows are complex and require significant depth to execute. The overall development of our core capabilities allows us to focus and build the expertise to drive business results. It is very important in this area that users only communicate within an infrastructure such as ours, which allows for proper implementation of security and compliance controls.
Tooth: How do you then work with your customers to apply your AI agent platform and technology to their specific operational needs?
Van Horn: We build generalized agents that are domain-specific and apply them in a business-specific implementation to improve each customer’s business model and bottom line. As a general starting point, consider form fill agents, customer knowledge agents, onboarding agents, and data conversion agents (CRM to CRM, portfolio reporting to portfolio reporting system).
When we work with our customers, we document existing workflows in detail to unlock capacity and reduce the time to complete the workflow with improved accuracy. An example of this is a large M&A transaction in which a company joins an RIA aggregator. There are many steps that collect, rationalize, convert, and audit data from multiple existing systems to transition that business to an entirely new technology stack.
This is where using agents to perform the extraction, validation, insertion, connection and auditing can increase accuracy and reduce company onboarding time by 50%. It also allows companies’ employees to focus on higher-value work as SMBs handle complex escalations, rather than manually facilitating these workflows. The business outcome is faster billing time, more parallelization of multiple transitions with existing staff, better service for the end customers, fewer resources involved in the process dealing with the data, and ultimately better business results for all stakeholders.
Tooth: What kind of large financial companies do you work with and how do you help them redesign and reimagine their middle office operations?
Van Horn: To date, fast-growing companies are showing great interest in redesigning the way they work so they can differentiate themselves in the next five years. Many companies, as they experience periods of high growth in their business, simply shift their tasks and workflows so as not to compromise current service levels.
Executives are well aware that this is not the model for the future during the next phase of growth. This is where a technology partner can reinvent how these companies view operating margins and unlock investments in more impactful areas of their business. This applies to brokers, family offices, RIAs and large aggregators.
Tooth: What outcomes and strategic benefits can conservatively be expected for both RIAs and enterprises?
Van Horn: Using agents is the future that will deliver better operating margins. How the company translates these efficiencies into high-impact areas within its business will ultimately unlock the next level of growth and differentiation.
Just as if someone were to imagine their company functioning without budget restrictions on employee spending. What could the company do if that wasn’t a constraint? If we had all the time and resources, what could we achieve? This mindset aligns well with implementing an agentic workforce, as they can see material gains despite current limitations.
Tooth: What do you recommend as the best approach or mindset that financial companies can adopt to help them be successful in integrating AI agent technology into their businesses?
Van Horn: Technology is developing so quickly and the technical skills to operate at the highest quality require building and maintaining these solutions as a core competency. Every company should be doing things internally that go beyond experimentation and using AI and agents wherever possible. But to unlock material value from a company’s highly complex operations, they must partner with a company like TIFIN AXIS.
Finally, companies need to find that partner and get started. Too much time can be wasted narrowing down to details and finding the ‘perfect’ use case to address. Find something that is easily measurable within your company (even if it is small) and implement and expand from there. Once you get started, you won’t look back.
Ultimately, AI agents give companies the opportunity to redesign their operations around intelligence rather than headcount. The companies moving now aren’t just improving workflows; they also improve what their middle office makes possible. For many, that shift will become the foundation for their next decade of growth.
This article was originally published here and is republished on Wealthtender with permission.
About the author
Bill Tooth
Founder Institute for Innovation Development
Bill Hortz is an independent business consultant and founder/dean of the Institute for Innovation Development, a platform and network for business innovation in the financial services industry. With over 30 years of experience in the financial services industry, including expertise in asset manager sales/marketing/branding, as well as creatively restructuring and developing internal/external sales and strategic account departments for 5 major financial firms including OppenheimerFunds, Neuberger&Berman and Templeton Funds Distributors. His broad experiences have led Bill to a strong belief, passion and advocacy for strategic thinking, innovation creation and strategic account management as the nexus of business skills needed to meet a business environment challenged by an increasingly rapid pace of change.
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