Guest Columnist Gerri Leder

Mr. Blumberg equates robo advice with advice, rather than robo advice being a tool that makes the continuous comprehensive counsel required by statute possible, in support of fiduciary duty and professional standing of the broker. Continuous comprehensive counsel is simply not possible without the necessary enabling technology (robo advice). This sort of technology is essential for advisors and aspiring brokers to be accountable for every recommendation they have made, establishing professional standing.

Mr. Rosenthal’s celebration of the industry denying the retail investor of the same consumer protections afforded to all other investors might explain why the industry has lost the trust and confidence of the investing public. Wouldn’t it be news that the SIFMA supports the honor and integrity of the broker by acknowledging and supporting the fiduciary duty of the broker in acting in the best interest of the investing public.

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In my humble opinion, Mr. Bloomberg is missing an important point. Robots can be used by advisors to automatically optimize the ETF holdings in a portfolio and also automatically changing weights as necessary. The important role of the RIA advisor would be to recommend the right robot (algorithm) that best fits the financial plans and risk level designed and recommended by the advisor to the client. Once this critical value has been added by the advisor for the fees charged, the robot would do the routine work of sending trades to the broker, and maintaining the asset value report as required by compliance. If individual investors decide to use robots directly as offered by their brokers then, its their decision and their risk or reward! I don’t believe that an advisor should shy away from using a robot as long as she/he knows how to add the real value, beyond what a dumb robot can do!

Michael Bloomberg steals the SIFMA NYC show by putting his finger on a great robo shortcoming 

Michael Bloomberg: I don’t believe in automation for client service.

SIFMA

Gerri Leder

Mary Jo White

Michael Bloomberg

Kenneth Bentsen

This section contains news and coverage about the dozens of conferences held in the advisory industry every year. Those conferences range from annual events put on by the big custodians to small hands-on workshops hosted by law firms, consultants and tech companies, among others. RIABiz can't cover all the conferences, but this page includes our stories about those we have written about.

We hope that getting a flavor of the different gatherings helps you decide which are worthwhile attending and &mdash; if you're in the conference business yourself &mdash; what clicks with attendees and what doesn't. Have a suggestion for a conference we should cover? Email me, Brooke Southall at <a href="mailto:brooke@riabiz.com">brooke@riabiz.com</a>.

Conferences

The past two years have been some of the most momentous in the relatively short history of the RIA profession. Legislators and regulators have been gradually embracing the fiduciary standard, though whether it will fully apply to everyone calling themselves advisors remains to be seen.

The Department of Labor’s crusade to lower costs and increase transparency in retirement plans means a spate of new regulations affecting advisors and brokers in that market. Dodd-Frank Financial Reform, meanwhile, continues to unroll across the profession, with the biggest change being a shift to state oversight of RIAs with less than $100 million AUM. In this section, you’ll find continually updated RIABiz.com coverage on all these topics.

RIA Compliance

Stripped down to its essentials, financial advice is a fairly straightforward proposition. Done well, a highly ethical individual stewards the assets and actions of an investor in a personal and professional interchange.
 
But now a vibrant new class of entrepreneurs is staking their fates and their fortunes on the premise that financial advice can be delivered in a better, cheaper, easier, more ethical, more transparent manner and, as a bonus, in a way more devoid of human annoyance on both ends of the transaction.
 
Cue the robo-advisors, arguably a callous misnomer for automated asset management. 
 
The prototypical robo-advisory entrepreneur has more brands on his or her resume than NASCAR. The bona fides of these industry upstarts often include Ivy-level colleges and MBA programs at Harvard or Stanford. They are often flush with IPO dollars realized at concerns like LinkedIn, Facebook, eBay, Amazon  and Microsoft. 
 
Robo-folk believe that technology is not an enabler of advice but rather, if engineered correctly, advice itself in digital form. 
 
And, they believe the best solutions originate in Silicon Valley or academia, not Wall Street. Robo-entrepreneurs are white-boarding the whole business model, culture and technology from scratch in the conviction that little can be learned from a legacy advice system still rooted in an investment banking culture acting under the core premise that if stockbrokers get rich some of the good effects will trickle down to clients – with the clients none the wiser. 
 
Robo-advisors are a scintillating topic for students of the advice game as they grow by hundreds of millions in assets every month, constantly evolve their business models and receive cash infusions from ever-larger swaths of venture capitals.
 
Throw in the fact that robo-advisors have yet to see a dime in profits -- and won’t in the foreseeable future -- and you have real intrigue. 
 
RIABiz has avidly covered the fast-evolving robo-advice phenomenon and will continue to do so. We present the growing body of articles here.

Robo-Advisors

The Bloomberg founder dismisses auto-advice amid human brokers who cheered SIFMA's ability to keep change in check

Michael Bloomberg steals the SIFMA NYC show by putting his finger on a great robo shortcoming

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