Retail Investing Opens Up to AI Assistants

Scalable Capital became the first bank in Europe to open its investment platform directly to outside artificial intelligence assistants on Aug. 25, letting customers connect ChatGPT, Claude or Grok to a real brokerage account holding actual money, Scalable Capital said in its announcement.

The German neobroker, which holds more than €60 billion for over 1 million customers, calls the feature Agentic Investing. Once connected, the AI can analyze a customer’s actual portfolio, compare it against a benchmark, calculate a savings plan needed to hit a specific goal, or adjust a limit order, all through plain-language prompts. Every trade and savings plan still requires the customer’s explicit confirmation before it executes, and deposits and withdrawals remain restricted to Scalable’s own app and website.

“A lot of people might still be hesitant to let ChatGPT look at their portfolio, manage their portfolio,” Scalable Capital co-CEO Erik Podzuweit told Reuters, describing the launch as a “first step” ahead of even deeper AI integration planned inside Scalable’s own app.

The mechanics run through the Model Context Protocol, an open technical standard that lets an AI system connect directly to outside services like a brokerage account.

US Brokers Are Taking Different Paths to the Same Destination

American brokerages have been building toward this same collapse of distance between advice and execution through several different models. Robinhood launched Agentic Trading and an Agentic Credit Card on May 27, letting an outside AI agent connect to a dedicated sub-account with its own budget and place real trades, PYMNTS reported.

“Our mission has always been to democratize finance for all, and now, that mission extends to AI agents,” Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev said in the company’s own release. Robinhood confines the agent’s trading activity to that separate account, though the agent can still view a customer’s full portfolio across every account they hold.

Interactive Brokers has taken a narrower approach so far. They launched Ask IBKR in October, an AI tool that answers a client’s questions about their own portfolio rather than generating trading instructions or connecting to an outside model like Claude or ChatGPT.

Public has gone further than either. The company became the first brokerage to introduce AI agents for investing. The customers can set standing instructions for an AI agent to execute trades, move cash and manage risk automatically inside Public’s own app, and separately, Public also lets customers connect Claude Desktop directly to a real brokerage account through the same Model Context Protocol Scalable Capital and Robinhood use, spanning stocks, ETFs, options and cryptocurrencies.

Power Users Already Manage Investments Through AI

These launches are targeting a specific, already-identified behavior. PYMNTS Intelligence found that power users, consumers using AI to complete 27 or more distinct tasks a month, represent 10% of all consumers and 19% of millennials specifically, a group whose activity includes higher-complexity tasks like personal investment management.

Mainstream users, by comparison, average around eight tasks a month and skew toward lower-complexity activities like comparison shopping, while holdouts who haven’t adopted AI at all still make up 53% of the population and 72% of baby boomers.

Power users have also grown more reliant over time, not just more numerous: Their average monthly task count rose from 25 in September to 27 in December, and 75% have used AI for at least a year, according to the same research. That is the exact population Scalable Capital, Robinhood, Interactive Brokers and Public are each racing to serve, consumers who have already moved past using AI to occasionally research a stock and toward folding it into a regular financial routine.

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