For any wealth advisor, gathering the previous data, emails, notes and other pertinent information needed to conduct meetings with multiple clients each day can be time consuming. But what if an advisor could instantly synthesize relevant data and previous interactions into brief notes before starting a meeting with each client?
That's the idea behind Orb Wealth, an artificial intelligence-assisted note-taking tool for wealth managers, which was created by a team of six students in Lehigh Business’ FinTech program as part of their capstone project last spring.
“Orb Wealth is designed to seamlessly integrate the wealth advisor's day-to-day tasks,” said team member Julia DeLitta ’25, a business information systems major. She said the tool “collects and summarizes all relevant data for meeting preparation and it also synchronizes and updates the post-meeting for the client” by pulling information from emails, Zoom meetings and Salesforce, a cloud-based software that connects businesses with customers.
DeLitta along with team members Matthew Connors ’24, Adrian Ross ’24, Cole Schubert ’24, Cotter Smart ’24 and Luke Strauss ’24 collaborated on the project together. The team was mentored by Seth Finkel ’80, chair for Lehigh's Center for Financial Services Advisory Council and a Barron’s magazine nationally ranked senior wealth advisor at Neuberger Berman, and Michael Ruane, the investment firm's head of AI, cloud services and technology business management.
The inception of Orb Wealth started when Finkel suggested the students find a way to use AI to summarize wealth advisors’ most helpful client information from multiple data sources — emails, notes from prior meetings and other critical Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software records, etc. — to prepare for meetings.
To get started, the team met with wealth advisors from Neuberger Berman to learn what their workdays were like and how they could possibly make that time more efficient.
“Centralizing and really automating all these tasks allows wealth advisors to dedicate more time to specific things like client acquisition and relationship management, which overall boosts productivity,” DeLitta said. “We did an estimate and [Orb Wealth] could save wealth advisors up to five hours a week and increase business efficiency up to 10 percent.”
Using simulated data, the students created the tool, but the new frontier of AI meant that it was a learning process for the students and their mentors. Ruane worked with students on the technical aspects.
Smart, a finance major who graduated in May and is now an associate financial advisor for the Royal Bank of Canada, said the project capitalized on the students’ strengths.
“I'd worked in wealth management two of the last three summers for internships, so I had a fairly robust understanding of the ins and outs and what could be fixed,” Smart said. “I'm not going to be able to sit there and write code, but I do understand where the inefficiencies are.”
Coding was an area where team members like Ross, a computer science and business major who graduated in May and now works at Oracle, excelled.
“I'd suggest something and Adrian [Ross] would say, ‘Yes, I can do that,’ or ‘No, that's ridiculous. Let me try this instead,’’’ Smart said. “He's a wizard when it comes to coding.”
Burak Eskici, a teaching assistant professor in the decision and technology analytics (DATA) department who advised the students, said he took a hands-off approach, letting the team divvy up the tasks and hold each other accountable.
“I think that experience was quite valuable because when they go to their jobs, they will not be able to select their colleagues,” Eskici said.
At their final presentation at Neuberger Berman's New York headquarters in May, Ruane said Orb Wealth was one of the best AI prototype tools he'd seen among the more than 150 AI pitches he'd heard in the previous 18 months.
“What they did in a very short period of time with very limited information I thought was impressive,” he said.
While Neuberger Berman does not use the program at present, Finkel said he could envision his firm continuing the collaboration in the future.
“I personally would be in favor of having it go further with Neuberger Berman and those students,” he said.
Don Bowen, assistant professor of finance and co-director of the FinTech minor, said Orb Wealth has real potential.
“[The team] made something that was really impressive and completely viable,” he said. “They had a working prototype of a product. Wealth advisors and anyone in a client-facing role could use the tool that they built. I thought it was incredible what they did.”
The capstone project also gave the team real-world experience and bolstered their confidence along the way.
“One of the things students really love to have, employers love to hear about and colleges like to make possible for their students is experiential learning,” Bowen said. “They're actively producing reports, information and products that firms need as the financial services space changes and develops rapidly.”
Bowen said Lehigh Business has worked hard to bring in great companies to work with students, and he credited professor Kathleen Weiss Hanley for connecting the FinTech program with Neuberger Berman. Hanley, a former senior economist at the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve and former deputy chief economist at the Securities and Exchange Commission, is director of the Center for Financial Services at Lehigh and co-director of the FinTech minor.
DeLitta said networking with professionals in the field and collaborating with other students to produce a prototype of a tool that could greatly assist professionals in financial services was one of the highlights of her college career.
“I think it was definitely the best course I've taken at Lehigh,” she said.
By Margie Peterson
