By Shaun Pocock, Senior Associate
Artificial Intelligence is impressive. It drafts emails, reviews documents, predicts trends and answers questions in seconds. In financial administration and fiduciary work, it is already useful and will only improve over time.
Yet, inside a real firm, handling real people, money and legal obligations, it quickly becomes clear that:
AI is excellent at repetition.
Experience has the edge on judgement.
This is not an argument against the use of AI. It is recognition of the real people who make the industry tick.
Across modern financial services, the move towards AI seems natural and inevitable, especially in progressive jurisdictions such as Gibraltar.
But these tools are most powerful when they enhance people, not replace them. A system may identify that a step in a process is incomplete, whereas an experienced administrator can tell you whether that gap matters, why it happened, and what it may trigger downstream. In other words, the human touch adds in a level of context that automated systems cannot yet achieve.
An example which comes to mind is related to compliance and onboarding. An AI or automated system may take into consideration a valid passport, acceptable proof of address document, concise proof of funds explanation and a documented corporate structure and conclude that all boxes are ticked and the engagement is low risk.
However, an experienced professional goes further, noticing patterns that a system cannot see. For instance, the individual listed as the sole owner and director consistently using an email domain located in an unrelated jurisdiction, offering only vague answers on day-to-day operations and relying on a third party to write all correspondence and instructions, despite that person having no formal role in the entity.
Nothing is technically wrong on paper, but the pattern reflects a nominee arrangement masking the real controlling party, which is a nuance that matters enormously for beneficial ownership. The human judgement was therefore necessary to avoid issues with AML obligations and regulatory exposure which could have otherwise been overlooked by artificial intelligence.
And then there are the finer details. Experience is remembering that a Director prefers a particular wording. It is noticing when requests seem strange or unusual for a particular client, or when something is technically correct, but doesn’t feel right.
Companies evolve. Regulations shift in tone before they shift in writing, and only human judgement and experience would be aware of these movements before they formally take effect. For example, in Gibraltar the GFSC announced that, beginning in 2026, it would start conducting enhanced supervisory inspections relating to the Register of Ultimate Beneficial Owners, Nominators and Appointors Regulations 2017, signalling stricter scrutiny of UBO data and enforcement well before any legislative amendments were published. While an AI system might only react once the updated rules are officially released, an experienced professional would pick up on these signals early and put into place a plan of action to guarantee compliance, while ensuring the operations of clients are not stalled or negatively impacted by such changes.
There is also the human dimension that underpins the industry. Clients do not experience a firm through workflows. When something goes wrong, or feels uncertain, it is not a dashboard that restores confidence. It is a person who understands both the rules and the reality.
The strongest fiduciary environments are not solely automated or human. They are layered: systems handle the predictable and people handle the ambiguous. Judgement and nuance often matter more than speed.
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