On October 17th, we hosted our "Beyond the Numbers" event to explore a topic that’s been at the heart of Multiply's vision for nearly a decade.
For years, "personalisation" in financial tech has been shallow. It’s meant using your name in an email or showing you a graph of your spending. But as our co-founder and CEO, Vivek Madlani, shared in his opening, we’re at a turning point.
Thanks to modern AI, we're moving from basic data analysis to genuine, human-level understanding.
The difference between data and understanding
Vivek shared a personal example of how the AI tools he uses have started to build a deep, contextual picture of him - not just as a user, but as a person.
- It knows he cares about cinnamon buns (because he's in a family bake-off).
- It knows he's an Arsenal fan (because he's always checking scores and figuring out his fantasy team).
- It knows he's planning home renovations (from his shared account activity).
Individually, these are just data points. But together, they form a rich, human tapestry. This is the kind of insight a great human financial adviser builds over years of conversation. They don't just ask, "How much do you want when you retire?" They ask why. They get to the bottom of what drives you, what you value, and what your real goals are.
This is the "Beyond the numbers" part. It’s the difference between a plan that’s mathematically correct and one that feels correct because it’s built around your life.
The new frontier: Scaling human empathy
This deep understanding is the key to unlocking the next generation of financial services. When a system truly gets you, it can:
- Make better recommendations: It can suggest a plan that prioritises travel and family experiences because it knows that's what you value more than just accumulating wealth.
- Explain things better: It can use the right metaphors to explain a complex financial plan. Maybe your plan is explained in terms of a football season's strategy, not a set of boring bar charts.
- Forge deeper trust: It can help you put your plan into action because it's your plan, built from your life, not a generic template.
The technology to have these deep, contextual, and ongoing conversations at scale is finally here. But this raises a critical question, especially for a technical audience...
How do you build this? How do you let an AI get to know a user while operating within the rigid, high-stakes, and highly regulated world of financial advice?
In our next post, we'll dive into the technical "how." Our co-founder and CTO, Mike Curtis, explains the compliance nightmare of using raw LLMs for advice and details Multiply's "on-rails" agentic system for building AI that is both human-like and fully auditable.
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