Daybreak - Would you trust AI to be your money-whisperer?

Episode Date: March 25, 2026

From platforms like Cred, Zerodha, and Groww integrating AI assistants, to Sebi-registered advisors now using AI to generate personalised investment recommendations, the shift is already underway. And with nearly 140 million investors and fewer than a thousand registered advisors to serve them, the math alone might make AI advice not just convenient, but necessary.Tune in.Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories. 🚨The Ken's Zero Shot podcast is hosting a live event! This is a speculative yet realistic discussion built around one premise: what happens when AI agents take off in India? How will they rewire existing habits, business models and profit pools? Since nobody knows for sure, we won't pretend to have all the answers. Instead we are going to break the narrative. Click here for details. 

We all have that one forgotten app on our phone, something that we might have signed up for, enabled a feature on, and then completely lost track off. Well, imagine opening that app one day and finding that it has quietly assembled a complete picture of your financial life. Every mutual fund, every bank account, even shares that you don't remember buying, just sitting there organized with an AI ready to talk to you through all of it. That is exactly where today's piece begins. And it opens up a much bigger question.

As AI inches its way into how we manage and analyze and act on our money, how much of the wheel do we really want to let go off? From platforms like CRED, Zeroda and Grow, integrating AI assistance to Sebi-registered advisors now using AI to generate personalized investment recommendations. The shift is always. already underway. And with nearly 140 million investors and fewer than a thousand registered advisors to serve them, the math alone might make AI advice, not just convenient but necessary. Today's edition was written by my colleague, Suprita Anabam, and I'm going to read it out to you.

The question that it asks is a simple one. Would you trust AI to be your money whisperer? Welcome to Daybreak, a business podcast from the Ken. I'm your host, Nick Da Sharma, and I don't chase the news cycle. Instead, every day of the week, my colleague Rachel Vargiz and I will bring you one business story that is worth understanding and worth your time. Today is Thursday, the 26th of March. Recently, I ventured into a forgotten corner of my credit app, cred money. It was a feature I only vaguely remember having enabled, and to my pleasant surprise,

it greeted me with a summary of my entire financial life scattered across, platforms, I had not touched in years. Grow, ICICI, Direct, HGFC securities and so on. The standout are holding in Zumato shares boasting an unrealized gain of 380%. I had no memory of buying them. Platforms like Red are quietly with prior express consent, aggregating not just stocks, but also your funds across bank accounts, mutual funds, FDs, EPFs and NPS, including the sovereign gold bond.

And at its heart is an AI named Clio. Built on open AI models, Clio, the company claims, now resolves 98% of user queries learning from, and I quote, data dead ends in real time. CRED is not alone in this reinvention. Many leading investment and fintech players, such as Roda, grow in money and phone pay are fast integrating AI into their services. Going forward, the AI chatbot will be the interface, set a co-founder of an investment platform that offers AI analysis of one's portfolio.

Platforms that are weak on AI are bound to lose traction. And how deeply it's been integrated with the platform services will define its ability to offer sophisticated assistance and advice, he added. Among the leading platforms, Zeroda and G. grow offer AI-assisted workflows via protocols that plug into LLMs like ChatGPT or Cloud. InMoney uses AI for internal data pipelines, feeding its models structured real-time inputs. All that is AI assistance, but some are going beyond mere handholding. MyFi, a Sebi-registered Investment Advisor platform, comes with AI-generated investment advice

leveraging a combination of AI models to deliver personalized investment recommendations. Another registered investment advisor platform, Lotus Dew, does the same with investment portfolios. This shift is making old advisory models feel obsolete. The traditional structure of being assigned a portfolio manager for lengthy consultations before they invest on your behalf already seems like a practice from decades past. Similarly, the tedious task of manually logging into and managing separate NPS, EPFO and bank accounts is being streamlined. If given that your logins and access to an application programming interface or API, an

agentic AI can take control of your investment platform and, with just a few prompts, curate investments to your needs. While the support and execution can be manual, semi-automatic, or fully automatic, depending on individual needs, platforms like Open Algos and U-Trade algos offer more sophistication. AI is quietly changing how we shop for investment products. From assistance to advise to control, the AI is ready. But are we and the regulator?

The market regulator Seby, for one, seems to be treading cautiously. It has deployed an AI-powered surveillance system to detect fraud, impersonating registered advisors on social media along with SEB-R-AIDAR, another AI tool to monitor and analyze mutual fund advertisements for potential conduct violations. It has also made clear the AI use case and its limitations in a framework published in October 2024. Let me read out an excerpt for you. An IA or RA who uses AI tool for servicing its clients, must provide complete disclosure of the extent of use of such tools to its prospective clients to enable them to take informed decision of continuance or otherwise with the IARA.

Considering that the Investment Advice Research Services provided by IA. Based on AI tools would affect the investment decision of clients. It is emphasized that the responsibility of data security, compliance with the regulatory provisions governing investment advisory services or research services lies solely with the IA irrespective of the scale and scenario of IA using AI tools. As for us, getting advised by AI seems to be becoming increasingly inevitable. Even if it is an AI advice, the algorithm must provide a clear reasoning and logic behind that advice, an investment advisor told me.

And if it merely produces a few random suggestions without sound reasoning, it is a a big no. Most of the platforms, whether it's Zeroda, in-money or grow, have not given right access to the order management system. It means that their AI can analyze investments but cannot place orders or actively trade. This restraint is reassuring. However, just as assistance is a reality today, AI-generated advice will be common tomorrow, especially given the fact that there are only 983 Sebi-registered investment advisors to serve over 140 million investors as of now.

A 2024 Deloitte report predicts that by 27, Gen A.I. will become the primary source of financial advice for retail investors. Would you trust AI-generated investment advice? Or, like many pros, keep your hands on the wheel even when assisted driving is on. Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of the Ken, India's first subscriber-focused business news platform. What you're listening to is just a small sample of a subscriber-only offerings and a full subscription offers daily, long-form feature stories, newsletters and a whole bunch of premium podcasts.

To subscribe, head to the ken.com and click on the red subscribe button on the top of the website. Today's episode was hosted and produced by my colleague, Snitha Sharma, and edited by Rajiv CN.