International financial advisory firm Hoxton Wealth has begun working with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to explore how AI can benefit both its own business and the wealth management sector more broadly.
The collaboration forms part of AWS's $1 billion investment in Forward Deployed Engineering, a new organization that embeds experienced AWS engineers, including those from frontier AI teams, directly with customer teams to co-develop and deploy agentic AI solutions in days rather than months. Engagements are structured around business outcomes and designed so the customer's own team achieves self-sufficiency by the end.
"AWS and its partner companies, including AI specialists, bring the technical expertise," says Mansel Oliver, Chief Technology Officer at Hoxton Wealth. "They're working with us to prove out various concepts, and we hope to take those live."
One initiative already underway uses AI to generate client reports, boosting advisor productivity and streamlining operations. Hoxton Wealth is also building an internal knowledge base to democratise expertise that currently sits with a handful of senior staff.
"Often an advisor would need to speak to a senior colleague to get an answer," Oliver explains. "We're taking that knowledge out of a few people's heads and making it available to everyone, so advisors can find answers themselves."
"Our goal is simple: help firms like Hoxton Wealth close the gap between AI ambition and production reality, deploying agentic AI at scale, and at startup speed. Hoxton Wealth has the domain expertise, and we bring AI engineers who turn that ambition into deployed systems in days, not months, so they can innovate independently. Our Forward Deployed Engineers build alongside the customer's team so the firm owns the capability long after we step back,” said Mark Jopling, Director of EMEA and APJ Financial Services at AWS.
Hoxton Wealth is using the AWS FDE organization to reshape its workflows. "Report generation that once took hours now takes minutes. We can put together personalised client presentations in minutes, find information across the business instantly instead of asking around, and complete compliance checks that used to take days in a fraction of the time," Oliver says.
Looking ahead, Oliver believes the benefits extend well beyond Hoxton Wealth.
"Our experience shows there's real value in AI when you're thoughtful about how you deploy it and focused on making a positive impact. The resources to get there are increasingly available. We're proof of that."