JPMorgan Chase sees that consulting services based around artificial intelligence (AI) could be used to select customer investments.

IndexGPT will tap "cloud computing software using artificial intelligence" for "analyzing and selecting securities tailored to customer needs," according to the filing.

Washington DC-based trademark attorney Josh Gerben said: "This is a real indication they might have a potential product to launch in the near future."

The filing includes "a sworn statement from a corporate officer essentially saying, 'Yes, we plan on using this trademark.'

JPMorgan must launch IndexGPT within about three years of approval to secure the trademark.

Gerben said that trademarks typically take nearly a year to be approved, thanks to the US Patent and Trademark Office backlogs. Applications are typically vaguely written to give companies the broadest possible protections.

However, JPMorgan's filing does specify that IndexGPT uses the same flavour of A.I. popularised by ChatGPT; the bank plans to use A.I. powered by "Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) models."

"It's an AI program to select financial securities. This sounds to me like they're trying to put my financial advisor out of business," Gerben said.