Bankers’ Winter Getaway to Sunny Florida Is Upended By AI Chaos

IndustriesFinanceGiftExpandTraders work on the floor of the NYSE in New York on Feb. 13. Markets were down after a steep drop on Thursday, as investors continue to worry about AI’s impact on the broader economy.Photographer: Spencer Platt/Getty ImagesGiftGift this articleAdd us on GoogleContact us:Provide news feedback or report an errorConfidential tip?Send a tip to our reportersSite feedback:Take our SurveyNew WindowGiftBy Georgie McKay and Nino PaoliFebruary 14, 2026 at 7:30 PM GMT+5:30BookmarkSaveTranslateListen5:34Takeaways by Bloomberg AIHideChevron UpAI tools have sparked fears that they threaten the financial services industry, leading to a selloff of financial services stocks.The S&P 500 Financials index and the KBW Bank Index have declined, with the latter sinking due to concerns about AI's impact on the industry.Some Wall Street professionals believe the selling reflects a knee-jerk reaction and may be overestimating the actual risk from AI, while others think investors need to differentiate between companies that are truly at risk and those that should be fine.It was supposed to be a relatively relaxing work week in the South Florida sun for the hundreds of bankers, brokers, advisers, portfolio managers, analysts and investors attending a series of financial industry conferences from Miami to Boca Raton. Then AI crashed the party.As traders dumped financial services stocks on Tuesday due to mounting fears that new artificial intelligence tools threaten the businesses as we know them, Patrick Lemmens, an executive director at Robeco Group and 30-year investing veteran, was wandering from meeting to meeting at the UBS Financial Services Conference in Key Biscayne, watching the chaos unfold on mobile phones and computer screens. Lemmens, who’s based in Rotterdam, The Netherlands, said he “did not come to Miami with the idea that every other day there would be another part of the financial services space getting killed.” But that’s basically what happened. It’s a continuation of a trend that’s been unfolding over the past few weeks, as AI worries have consumed nearly every part of the financial sector. Wealth managers, insurance brokers, big banks, boutique advisers, financial data providers and even exchanges have all taken a hit. The S&P 500 Financials index declined 4.8% this week and the KBW Bank Index sank 5.5%, for both the biggest weekly loss since the tariff freakout last April.Read more: Wealth Manager Stocks Sink as Traders Flee Next AI CasualtyThe culprit on Tuesday was a tool unveiled by technology startup Altruist Corp. that helps financial advisers personalize strategies for clients and create pay stubs, account statements and other documents. On Monday, investors unloaded insurance brokerage stocks after the online marketplace Insurify rolled out a new application that uses OpenAI’s ChatGPT to compare auto-insurance rates. That came on the heels of a new model released last week by Anthropic that’s aimed at automating financial research and legal services, triggering selloffs in those stocks. Moving between conferences, attendees sporting red Bank of America Corp. wrist bands and white UBS lanyards sought answers from executives who were just as confused as them about what this all means.“You try to get back to the meetings and ask the various companies you are talking to in the various parts: the alts, the banks, investment banks, the insurance brokers, the wealth managers,” Lemmens said. “You get sort of sucked into everybody asking the same question. What’s your software exposure? What are you doing with AI? What is the danger of AI?”“And then everybody also giving the same answer, our exposure to software is not that big and not all the companies are going to be killed,” he added. “You get a lot of that response. And then you look at the markets and the markets obviously are totally of a different opinion.”As the stocks sank, executives were forced to defend their positions on the fly, since they were primarily there to discuss their solid earnings and strong deal pipelines until AI disruption stepped in and stole the show.“I think AI is gonna enhance the quality of advice and it’s gonna help advisers scale and be able to serve more clients more effectively with the same set of resources,” Jed Finn, Morgan Stanley’s head of wealth management, said at the UBS conference. Morgan Stanley shares lost 4.9% on the week. ExpandDavid SolomonPhotographer: Paul Yeung/BloombergGoldman Sachs Chief David Solomon kicked off the event on Tuesday before wealth manager stocks slumped. He reiterated expectations for strength in capital markets activity and said the US economy remains poised for strong growth this year. His comments on AI were focused on declines in software stocks, which he thought were overdone.Read more: Goldman’s Solomon Says Software Selloff Has Been ‘Too Broad’One strange dynamic of the selloffs is that while these AI tools will likely hurt financial services employment, they actually should help the firms improve their profits and margins.For example, UBS insurance analyst Brian Meredith said he came into the year thinking that AI would boost productivity for brokers. When the selloff was unfolding, he was moving between meetings and fielding calls from companies asking what was going on. “I would not have predicted what happened,” he said. “In fact, if anything I’m actually more positive on the insurance brokers in 2026.” Of course it wasn’t just those defrosting in Florida who were being inundated with questions. Citizens analyst Devin Ryan was in his Manhattan office on a phone meeting with a flooded inbox and “a multitude of emails coming in, and every channel that I have that people can reach out to me is blowing up.”“I was trading emails and Team messages and Bloomberg chats, and my phone was ringing,” Ryan recalled. The investor reaction “shows that everything is on heightened fragility with AI headlines.” However, many Wall Street pros warn that some of this steep selling reflects a knee-jerk reaction and could be overestimating the actual risk from the various AI uses and tools.“Call me skeptical,” said Stephen Biggar, director of financial services research at Argus Research. “The market seems to react to these things, and then the use case is quite a bit different.”The flip in sentiment on AI from growth tool to wrecker of industries started at the end of last year. The software industry in particular has been dogged by worries about what’s coming. An index that tracks software stocks hit a peak on Sept. 22 and is down 30% since then, compared with a 2.1% rise in the S&P 500 Index. There has been a shift “to look at it from the lens of not what can AI do for this business to catapult it to the next level, but actually, you know, is there a risk that these businesses just simply don’t exist in three or four years time,” said Ken Barry, head of European private equity at the law firm White & Case.However, Barry thinks investors need to start differentiating the companies that are truly at risk from the ones that should be fine when everything calms down. “The reaction has been indiscriminate and frankly it needs to be much more differentiated,” he said. “There is a bit of a sense at the moment that the public markets are no longer a benchmark for some of these assets because the market is just reacting so wildly to the news that’s coming out.