On Tuesday, June 23, SoFi announced that it acquired Composer, an AI-powered digital trading platform. The platform enables investors to use natural language prompts to develop automated trading strategies, which it calls Symphonies. Corporate Insight has covered Composer in our e-Monitor AI in Retail Investing report and our recently released survey study AI in Financial Services Today.
Composer offers sophisticated, rules-based investment strategy building that requires no coding. Investors can take three paths: describe a custom strategy in plain English, browse a marketplace of more than 2,000 community-built Symphonies, or combine several strategies into a single portfolio.
The platform provides a high level of control, allowing investors to set specific weights, conditions, and filters for rules. It also features a robust backtesting tool for analyzing potential strategies against historical data.
SoFi’s acquisition of Composer, which comes on the heels of Robinhood’s release of an agentic trading offering and Charles Schwab’s introduction of an AI Portfolio Insights tool, represents a significant development. Additionally, the acquisition fits a broader pattern at SoFi itself, which recently introduced a SoFi Coach AI chatbot that can offer personalized financial insights. For some time, brokerages, and financial services institutions more broadly, had invested heavily in AI initiatives focused on back-office operations and internal processes, but had largely steered clear of releasing consumer-facing AI tools.
That reticence is fading, and it appears an inflection point for the industry’s adoption of AI has arrived. We are seeing industry pressure coupled with the fact that as AI becomes ubiquitous in consumers’ daily lives, retail investors will increasingly expect their brokerages to offer meaningful AI capabilities. CI, therefore, expects this wave of AI launches to continue, as additional brokerages seek to keep pace.
In a press release announcing the acquisition, SoFi CEO Anthony Noto said, “Composer has built one of the most innovative AI-powered investing platforms available to retail investors today … As AI becomes a foundational part of investing, Composer by SoFi strengthens our ability to deliver powerful investing tools through an experience that is simple, intuitive, and accessible.”
Explore our Insights page for more research on trends in brokerage and other industries. And to learn more about how CI’s subscription services can help your investing firm enhance its digital experience, check out our Online Brokerage Research Services.
Sam Marlowe
Sam Marlowe is a Senior Analyst on CI's brokerage team.