In this interview, Will Hicks, Head of Global Retirement at FIS, explains how AI is transforming retirement and wealth management — not by replacing experts, but by amplifying their capacity. Learn how real-time, event-driven platforms, AI-assisted automation, and enterprise-grade security enable personalized participant experiences, faster regulatory implementation, and better outcomes at scale. Whether you’re building recordkeeping systems, advising clients, or managing operations, discover practical strategies to integrate AI responsibly and boost organizational impact.
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
Joining me now is William Hicks. He’s the head of global retirement for the technology firm, FIS.
Will, it’s always great to see you. Thanks for joining us on the program this morning.
William O. Hicks, Global Head of Retirement, FIS Global
Great to see you as well. Thanks for having me.
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
I’m really tickled pink to have you on the program. There has been an evolution in our industry around retirement and wealth management and technology plays such a vital role. Let me just set a baseline here.
How has, and you’ve seen it for years and years, years, not to out you and your age, but how has the retirement and wealth technology industry evolved, especially over the past decade?
William O. Hicks, Global Head of Retirement, FIS Global
I think that’s a great question. So I think 10 years ago, most of our industry was built around, I would say operational efficiency, reconciliation, transaction processing. And I think that was the right move, right?
The systems were stable, but they were largely, I think, built for a different era. I mean, there were slower regulatory cycles, which I think is a big one, slower participant expectations, heavily siloed infrastructure between record keeping, wealth management, custody, advice, they were all separate. I think what’s changing isn’t just the technology, it’s the participant.
The participants’ expectations have changed. So consumers now, they manage their lives through real-time data banking, right? Highly personalized platforms, even if it’s homegrown in some cases, like I’ve seen use cases of Chad GTP with Notion and Obsidian creating a financial life for our participants.
And so they stopped really accepting an experience that really felt like it was delayed and fragmented, which I think is where our industry was. They expect, I would say, a level of immediacy, transparency, personalization, guidance, and again, not just record keeping. So at the same time though, I think also the economics and regulatory environment has changed.
So if you take Secure 2.0, it accelerated retirement income conversations, managed accounts, those are gonna continue to scale. The industry, I think, moved from simply administering plans towards actually helping participants navigate their complex financial lives. And that fundamental change is more of a modernization of the fundamental platform.
So for example, record keepers in the past were primarily, again, operational processors. I think the next generation record keeper has to function like a continuous engagement and orchestration platform. I think that’s one capable of integrating advice, income, wellness, personalization into a single participant experience.
And then also coming in real time, right? And to me, that’s the real distinction between modernization and a true re-platforming. Modernization to me is extending the life of legacy models and applications.
Re-platforming is redesigning the foundation so that the platform can continuously evolve as the industry evolves.
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
Look, let me follow up on that. You talked about personalization. I’m curious, I think you have a, interesting role in the industry because you have to digest all these regulatory changes but the technology advances like overnight.
How do you, as a firm, as an organization, how do you stay, for lack of a better term, current, up to date, and able to synthesize the new technology into the platform for your clients?
William O. Hicks, Global Head of Retirement, FIS Global
That’s a really important question. I think I would add on to that. How do you do all of that at scale?
Yes. And I think personalization is fundamentally, it’s a data and an orchestration challenge, right? So most systems were built around, again, accounts, transactions, not around continuously understanding the participant from a context perspective.
So data lives across fragmented systems, right? Updates move in batches, experiences are more reactive versus proactive. And that model breaks down because participants expect the same responsiveness that they expect in their consumer finance systems as well.
I think our view for FRP and FIS is that personalization only becomes possible when the platform itself, the platform itself is designed to operate in that real-time scenario. So the system has to understand events as they happen. So we’re talking about event-driven architecture, right?
Contributions, loans, income changes, life cycles, life events, retirement readiness signals, and then make those signals actionable across the experience layer, right? That’s why we focus heavily on building the platform that allows the data to move, that allows workflow and servicing and intelligence to operate together versus a disconnected type of system. And strategically, I think that matters because the economics of the industry have changed.
So we can’t differentiate between maintaining infrastructure. We have to differentiate between the engagement, the advice, the guidance, and then ultimately participant outcomes. I think the firms that win this over the next decade won’t necessarily be the ones with the biggest infrastructure footprint.
They’ll be the ones that I think that can adapt the fastest and personalize the best and evolve without consistently rebuilding the core platform underneath. So to sum it up, I’d see personalization from my perspective as an enablement, right? It’s our responsibility to enable the platform to allow our record keepers and clients to add in the personalization layer.
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
So it sounds like from what I’m discerning, agility as a technology provider plays a key role. I have to ask you about artificial intelligence because not a day goes by, and I’m sure you hear this all day long in your work, but not a day goes by when you read in the popular press something about artificial intelligence. How is AI in our industry, in the retirement industry, and in the wealth management industry, how are you seeing AI deployed for the betterment of your customers?
William O. Hicks, Global Head of Retirement, FIS Global
Yeah, that’s also an important question.
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
These are great- It’s a loaded question, I think, but it’s a good question.
William O. Hicks, Global Head of Retirement, FIS Global
Well, there’s a lot to unpack there because there’s also the angle of, right, is it replacing our workers and what do we do around that challenge? But I think AI in retirement and wealth management, for me, it’s not primarily about replacing people, and I think that everyone should take that tone. It’s about increasing the organizational capacity.
I think that’s where we win. The first real deployments I’m seeing are in the operational layers where we’re consuming enormous amounts of time creating things that don’t lead to much differentiation. So if you think about software maintenance, regulatory implementation, workflow servicing, testing, document processing, anything that’s repeatable from an operational activity perspective.
And historically, even implementing major regulatory changes often become a multi-quarter deployment effort, right, under legacy infrastructure without AI. AI-assisted development and automation I think dramatically improves those outcomes, and that’s where we’re looking at first, and that’s what I see across the industry. And then from a talent perspective, I think that matters most in retirement and wealth because I think every hour a highly skilled worker spends on maintaining a system is an hour that they’re not spending improving participant outcomes or advisor experiences or even innovation.
So AI for us just raises the bar. In this industry, the challenge usually isn’t generating the code, right? We can tell you that from a technology perspective.
The challenge is operational complexity, governance, compliance nuance, decades of accumulated use cases and edge cases. So directly answer your question. I think there’s a broader workforce shift happening underneath all of this.
To me, the people who become most valuable in the next phase of the industry aren’t the ones who only understand retirement, and it’s not even the only ones who understand the legacy retirement operations. I think it’s those that can bridge both worlds because the industry still does run on decades of institutional knowledge, right? You gotta have plan administration, compliance interpretation, right?
Interpretation is big there. Participant behavior, operational judgment. So AI systems won’t replace any of that expertise because they actually depend on it.
I think what changes is how we leverage the expertise, right? The work moves kind of up the value chain, if you will. So experienced workers might shape workflows, define governance models, validate outputs, and really help train organizations to operate responsibly alongside AI.
So from my perspective, AI is less about eliminating expertise and it’s more about refocusing it and raising the bar across the board for both industries, wealth and retirement.
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
Let me ask you about data privacy. I think that’s another issue that, I mean, you can’t help, again, following up on the AI conversation, but you can’t help read like the latest FBI blotter or Department of Justice blotter that talks about a hack. And there are foreign bad actors, nation states that are trying to attack the financial services industry in the broader US infrastructure.
How do you avoid, how do you create a technology infrastructure to avoid these horrific scams, these fraudsters, these bad actors, or can you?
William O. Hicks, Global Head of Retirement, FIS Global
Yeah, I think, and I’ll just speak specifically about the retirement industry and bleed into the others. And we’ve always taken SecureSleep very seriously. We’re serving tens of millions of participants, trillions of dollars in assets.
But I think for us, the threat environment has actually changed, right? The challenge isn’t preventing isolated attacks anymore. I think that’s news of the past.
You’re dealing with, to your point, highly organized cyber crime operations, sophisticated fraud networks, AI-enabled threats operating on a global scale. So security can’t be treated as a static technology implementation anymore. It has to function as a continuously evolving operational discipline, if you will.
And I think what brings FIS into that environment is we are used to handling financial institution security at scale and with maturity. So because FIS operates across banking, payments, and capital markets globally, I think the security posture required of the platform is extraordinarily high, right? The governance models, resiliency requirements, monitoring capabilities, operational controls designed specifically for financial services.
And I think that’s important for retirement providers to understand because they don’t have to independently build and maintain that entire posture themselves. That’s a key point. When they operate within our platform, FRP, or within FIS, they inherit the advantages of infrastructure already operating at an enterprise financial services scale.
And I think no serious organization believes security is ever solved, right? I think that’s not genuine, right? I think the objective is to continuously adapt, improving resilience, accelerating detection, strengthening governance, faster responses as threats start to evolve.
And I also think AI becomes increasingly important, right, defensively. The partnership between FIS and Anthropic, I think is one that reflects where the industry is heading more broadly. So we’re using AI not just for productivity, but for operational intelligence, investigation, monitoring, faster response capabilities inside highly regulated environments.
So strategically, that’s one of the advantages of operating on a modern platform. Rubber keepers aren’t fighting a symmetric security battle alone. They’re operating within infrastructure designed to evolve alongside the broader financial system itself.
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
I’ve got about two minutes left, Will. Let me kind of close things out, kind of where we started. It takes agility, it takes innovation.
Is it possible to future-proof your technology platform or are you always in a constant motion to improve? I mean, I don’t think you can, well, I’m not from your part of the industry, but I would imagine you can’t just sit still.
William O. Hicks, Global Head of Retirement, FIS Global
No, I think you’re right. I don’t think you future-proof a platform by trying to predict the future. Most industries are terrible at prediction, right?
We know that. You future-proof a platform by building an organization and fundamental architecture capable of adapting to market changes, right? So to me, that’s one of the biggest lessons in the retirement industry is learned over the last two decades.
Many legacy platforms, they weren’t built poorly. They were built for the constraints and expectations of a particular era, which was okay when there was far less volatility, right? But in today’s environment, the changes are happening too quickly, right?
For those rigid sort of schemas. Participant expectations are evolving faster. Regulation evolves faster.
AI evolves even faster than that. Product innovation evolves faster. So the question becomes, can the platform absorb continuous change without creating organizational paralysis every time the market moves?
So that’s the philosophy behind what we build. We designed it around adaptability because flexibility becomes, I think, the strategic advantage. If every major shift requires a multi-year rebuilding effort, then eventually the platform becomes the constraint on innovation instead of enabling it, right?
And I think an ecosystem strategy matters just as much as the architecture. No single provider is gonna invent every product capability that participants, advisors, and every persona needs. I think the winning platform will be the ones that allow innovation to integrate quickly.
And I think safely, and it’s repeatable without destabilizing the core underneath. So I think future-proofing is less about predicting the next trend on where the market is heading. I think you can’t predict the future, not with precision, but you can build a platform that evolves without resisting it, if you will.
Yeah.
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
Well, they always say in our industry, past performance is not indicative of future results, right? Absolutely. So I think that probably applies here.
And we don’t have a time machine yet. We can’t find wormholes. So until then, we’re just gonna have to continue to be agile.
Will Hicks, it’s great to see you. Thanks for joining us. And look, we look forward to having you back on the program again very soon, sir.
William O. Hicks, Global Head of Retirement, FIS Global
Absolutely. Thanks for having me. Can’t wait to come back.