Most pages rank AI coaches. This one tells you whether you need one at all — and the decisions where an AI coach is not legally allowed to be your answer.
Your answer
An AI coach is enough
Everything you picked is factual and reversible, so none of it is regulated investment advice. You do not need to pay a registered investment adviser for this, and a coach that works from your real numbers will beat one that works from averages.
Why each choice lands where it does
Under the Investment Advisers Act of 1940, fiduciary duties attach the moment a system provides “investment advice” as defined in the Act. A free consumer chatbot is not a registered investment adviser, owes you no fiduciary duty, and is not supervised by the SEC for what it tells you.
An AI financial coach is software that answers money questions using your own figures — what you own, what you owe, what you earn — rather than generic averages. In both the US and the UK it is almost never regulated, and that is the defining fact about the category. It means an AI coach can model, measure and explain without limit, but it cannot give you the one thing a regulated adviser gives: a personal recommendation that someone is accountable for.
HM Treasury put the asymmetry plainly in its Financial Services AI Adoption Plan on 14 July 2026: regulated firms face strict obligations and liability, while unregulated AI providers can scale rapidly without equivalent safeguards, and AI can produce outputs that resemble personalised advice without meeting standards on suitability, explainability or accountability. The FCA had already flagged AI-powered personal finance chatbots as an emerging risk in its perimeter report of 26 March 2026.
The Mills Review found that around 26% of consumers trust general-purpose tools such as ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini for financial advice, despite limited awareness that formal routes to recourse will not apply. That second clause is the whole problem. People are not wrong to find these tools useful; they are wrong about what happens when the answer is bad.
If an FCA-authorised adviser gives you unsuitable advice, you can take it to the Financial Ombudsman Service. If a US registered investment adviser breaches its fiduciary duty under the Investment Advisers Act of 1940, there are legal and regulatory routes. If a chatbot is wrong, there is no ombudsman, no fiduciary duty, and no compensation scheme. The tool above is built around that asymmetry rather than around which product we would like you to buy.
The perimeter has not moved yet, but it is being actively reviewed, so treat anything you read about this as dated. Recommendation 2 of the Mills Review asks the FCA to undertake a comprehensive review of the consumer, competition and wider impacts of guidance and advice-like outputs generated by general-purpose large language models, and to assess whether further consumer-facing measures such as disclosures and education are needed. Recommendation 3 proposes a simple, consistent form of words, used voluntarily across the sector, so that consumers can tell regulated from unregulated AI-enabled financial guidance apart.
Running alongside it, HM Treasury and the FCA's Advice Guidance Boundary Review proposes clarifying the advice/guidance line and creating two new categories between them — targeted support and simplified advice. In the US the direction is different: the SEC treats AI as a tool under existing statutes rather than as a separate regime, so fiduciary duties attach to the activity, not the technology. Its February 2025 proposals on firms supervising AI in client communications do not reach consumers using a free chatbot directly.
Richify is an AI coach, not a regulated adviser, and this page exists partly to say so in a place people will actually read. The coach works from figures you enter — assets, debts, income, goals — in your own currency and tax jurisdiction, so answers are computed from your position rather than recalled from training data. That is a narrower promise than “ask me anything about money”, and deliberately so: the failure mode the FCA is worried about is confident open-ended opinion with no state behind it.
If you want the product comparison instead — features, pricing and how the AI apps stack up against each other — that is a different question and it has its own page: the AI personal finance app comparison. If you want to start from your own numbers, the net worth calculator is the usual first step.
Richify is free on iOS and Android. Enter what you own and owe once — no bank login — and the coach works from your real position, not averages. It will also tell you when a question needs a regulated adviser.
Download Richify — It's FreeFor some jobs, yes; for others, no, and the split is not about how good the AI is. An AI coach can do the work that is factual and reversible — budgeting, debt payoff ordering, net worth tracking, modelling scenarios, explaining how a rule works. What it cannot do is give you a regulated personal recommendation to buy, sell, switch or transfer a specific investment or pension. In the US that activity is defined by the Investment Advisers Act of 1940 and carries a fiduciary duty; in the UK it is regulated advice under the FCA, and it comes with liability and access to the Financial Ombudsman Service. A free consumer chatbot carries none of that. The practical rule: use an AI coach to arrive at a decision informed, and use a regulated adviser when the decision is large, irreversible, or ends in a specific product recommendation.
Generally not, and that is the single most important thing to know before you rely on one. HM Treasury's Financial Services AI Adoption Plan, published 14 July 2026, describes the asymmetry directly: regulated firms face strict obligations and liability, while unregulated AI providers can scale rapidly without equivalent safeguards, and AI can produce outputs that resemble personalised advice without meeting standards on suitability, explainability or accountability. The FCA's March 2026 perimeter report flagged AI-powered personal finance chatbots as an emerging risk, and Recommendation 2 of the Mills Review asks the FCA to review the consumer and competition impacts of advice-like outputs from general-purpose large language models. Recommendation 3 proposes a consistent form of words so consumers can tell regulated from unregulated AI-enabled guidance apart. None of that has changed the perimeter yet.
You usually have no recourse, and most people do not realise this. The Mills Review found that around 26% of consumers trust general-purpose tools such as ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini for financial advice, despite limited awareness that formal routes to recourse will not apply. If a UK FCA-authorised adviser gives you unsuitable advice you can complain to the Financial Ombudsman Service and may be compensated. If a US registered investment adviser breaches its fiduciary duty there are legal and regulatory routes. If a chatbot is wrong, there is no ombudsman, no fiduciary duty and no compensation scheme. That asymmetry is the reason to match the tool to the size of the decision.
It depends on which job you are buying it for. For continuous work — tracking net worth across accounts, keeping a plan current as markets and salaries move, answering the same question at 11pm on a Tuesday — an AI coach is cheap relative to the alternative, because a human adviser typically charges a percentage of assets or several hundred per hour and is not available continuously. For one-off high-stakes decisions such as a pension transfer, the economics reverse: a single regulated adviser fee buys you suitability, liability and recourse that no subscription provides. Many people are best served by both, using the coach for the ongoing 95% and paying a regulated adviser for the handful of decisions that are irreversible.
Four things, and they cover most of ordinary financial life. First, measurement — pulling scattered assets and debts into one number and keeping it current. Second, arithmetic you would not do by hand, such as whether overpaying a loan beats investing the same money, or what a contribution change does to a projection. Third, explanation — turning a rule you have to comply with into plain language for your situation. Fourth, consistency, because it does not get bored of the same question or judge you for asking it. What ties those together is that they are all reversible and none of them ends in a personal recommendation to buy a specific product.
The difference is state and scope. A general-purpose chatbot answers the question in front of it with no memory of your balance sheet, no live prices and no jurisdiction fixed, which is exactly the setup the FCA's perimeter report identified as risky. Richify's coach works from your own entered assets, debts and goals, in your own currency and tax jurisdiction, so the answer is computed rather than recalled. It is deliberately built around calculators and your actual figures instead of open-ended opinion. It is still not a regulated adviser and does not give personal recommendations on specific investments — the tool above will tell you plainly when your question needs one.
Last updated: August 2026. Sources: HM Treasury, Financial Services AI Adoption Plan (14 July 2026), including the Mills Review recommendations and the 26% trust finding; FCA perimeter report (26 March 2026); HM Treasury and FCA Advice Guidance Boundary Review; US Investment Advisers Act of 1940. Richify is not a regulated financial adviser and nothing here is a personal recommendation — it is educational information about where the regulated boundary sits.
For some jobs, yes; for others, no, and the split is not about how good the AI is. An AI coach can do the work that is factual and reversible — budgeting, debt payoff ordering, net worth tracking, modelling scenarios, explaining how a rule works. What it cannot do is give you a regulated personal recommendation to buy, sell, switch or transfer a specific investment or pension. In the US that activity is defined by the Investment Advisers Act of 1940 and carries a fiduciary duty; in the UK it is regulated advice under the FCA, and it comes with liability and access to the Financial Ombudsman Service. A free consumer chatbot carries none of that. The practical rule: use an AI coach to arrive at a decision informed, and use a regulated adviser when the decision is large, irreversible, or ends in a specific product recommendation.
Generally not, and that is the single most important thing to know before you rely on one. HM Treasury's Financial Services AI Adoption Plan, published 14 July 2026, describes the asymmetry directly: regulated firms face strict obligations and liability, while unregulated AI providers can scale rapidly without equivalent safeguards, and AI can produce outputs that resemble personalised advice without meeting standards on suitability, explainability or accountability. The FCA's March 2026 perimeter report flagged AI-powered personal finance chatbots as an emerging risk, and Recommendation 2 of the Mills Review asks the FCA to review the consumer and competition impacts of advice-like outputs from general-purpose large language models. Recommendation 3 proposes a consistent form of words so consumers can tell regulated from unregulated AI-enabled guidance apart. None of that has changed the perimeter yet.
You usually have no recourse, and most people do not realise this. The Mills Review found that around 26% of consumers trust general-purpose tools such as ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini for financial advice, despite limited awareness that formal routes to recourse will not apply. If a UK FCA-authorised adviser gives you unsuitable advice you can complain to the Financial Ombudsman Service and may be compensated. If a US registered investment adviser breaches its fiduciary duty there are legal and regulatory routes. If a chatbot is wrong, there is no ombudsman, no fiduciary duty and no compensation scheme. That asymmetry is the reason to match the tool to the size of the decision.
It depends on which job you are buying it for. For continuous work — tracking net worth across accounts, keeping a plan current as markets and salaries move, answering the same question at 11pm on a Tuesday — an AI coach is cheap relative to the alternative, because a human adviser typically charges a percentage of assets or several hundred per hour and is not available continuously. For one-off high-stakes decisions such as a pension transfer, the economics reverse: a single regulated adviser fee buys you suitability, liability and recourse that no subscription provides. Many people are best served by both, using the coach for the ongoing 95% and paying a regulated adviser for the handful of decisions that are irreversible.
Four things, and they cover most of ordinary financial life. First, measurement — pulling scattered assets and debts into one number and keeping it current. Second, arithmetic you would not do by hand, such as whether overpaying a loan beats investing the same money, or what a contribution change does to a projection. Third, explanation — turning a rule you have to comply with into plain language for your situation. Fourth, consistency, because it does not get bored of the same question or judge you for asking it. What ties those together is that they are all reversible and none of them ends in a personal recommendation to buy a specific product.
The difference is state and scope. A general-purpose chatbot answers the question in front of it with no memory of your balance sheet, no live prices and no jurisdiction fixed, which is exactly the setup the FCA's perimeter report identified as risky. Richify's coach works from your own entered assets, debts and goals, in your own currency and tax jurisdiction, so the answer is computed rather than recalled. It is deliberately built around calculators and your actual figures instead of open-ended opinion. It is still not a regulated adviser and does not give personal recommendations on specific investments — the tool above will tell you plainly when your question needs one.