At a time when artificial intelligence is increasingly seen as a tool to enhance human productivity, Waton Financial (NASDAQ: WTF) is flipping that script entirely. The company’s vision? A future where artificial intelligence doesn’t just support trading operations, it is the entire operation.
Waton has spent the past few years transforming from a traditional brokerage into a SaaS-based fintech platform. It launched Brokerage Cloud in 2022, a full-stack trading and operations platform for small and mid-sized brokerages. In 2023, it became the only AWS-certified securities trading software provider in the world. And in 2024, it rolled out AI-powered customer service bots, an AI Investor Relations Officer, and AI risk monitoring tools – all designed to automate the financial stack.
But Chairman and CTO Kai Zhou says this is just the beginning. During my recent interview, he explained that the company’s goal isn’t merely to use AI for efficiency. It’s to build the infrastructure that lets AI act independently in the financial system.
That difference is profound. Where others in the fintech space are building AI tools to help human traders make better decisions, Waton is constructing a financial infrastructure where AI agents can open accounts, make trades, execute strategies, and attract human investors on their own.
Zhou was clear about the implications. "Stop utilizing AI to help people do the trades. Just let people invest directly in AI."
To accomplish this, Waton envisions itself as the middle layer in a new market triangle: humans, institutions, and autonomous AIs. Retail and professional investors could choose which AI fund to back, while Waton’s AI systems handle custody, compliance, and execution – no humans required.
Of course, that vision is not without friction. Regulatory compliance, fiduciary responsibility, and licensing frameworks were never designed to accommodate completely non-human entities. Zhou acknowledged the difficulty: "We are currently encountering many kinds of issues, especially from the compliance side…We are actively and positively connecting with [regulators] to convince them that this is viable, that this is the future."
Waton isn’t rushing to scale. It’s building slowly and deliberately, betting that the regulatory and societal context will eventually catch up to its infrastructure.
"Personally, I don't think we’re the company…that is likely to run faster than others. A better way for us to compete with other players in this industry is to find a way, build, and wait."
Zhou’s vision of a completely autonomous AI brokerage may sound a little wild, but in a world where AI already writes code, generates images, and assists in trading decisions, this model might not be as far off as it seems. And if Zhou is right, the most profitable financial platforms of the next decade might not be human at all.
"Whether you believe it or not, let's agree to disagree, right? We will see," says Zhou.
[Image credit: Midjourney]
