Brooke Southall

Robo Advisors will never replace human advisors if human advisors take advantage of technological innovations which take the human capacity to reason beyond its limited three dimensional limitation to reason. Who would argue to the contrary? Machines have no such limitation and humans can interpret data and have judgment not possible with machines.

Robo Advice as a treat is a myth unless the level of routine counsel provided neither is continuous and comprehensive nor adds value, both of which are advanced by robo advice.

SCW

Elliot Weissbluth will referee -- with a human bias -- a debate on robo-advisors starring Joe Duran, John Michel, and Jon Stein

Elliot Weissbluth will play moderator with a strong robo viewpoint -- by Hamburger design.

HighTower

MarketCounsel

Brian Hamburger

Joe Duran

Elliot Weissbluth

Jud Bergman

Jon Stein

John Michel

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

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 RIA business has many tech vendors working hard to serve its diverse needs, and we're seeing technology become a more crucial part of setting up and running an RIA than ever before.

The Technology section includes unbiased tech reviews, tech-related news, and coverage of tech-related conferences.

Technology

MarketCounsel Summit also adds a second panel: Fortigent's Jamie McIntyre mediating Envestnet’s Jud Bergman, LPL’s Victor Fetter, and ActiFi’s Spencer Segal on an advisor support futurist theme

Elliot Weissbluth will referee -- with a human bias -- a debate on robo-advisors starring Joe Duran, John Michel, and Jon Stein

Related Moves

February 8, 2023 at 3:03 AM

February 19, 2021 at 8:58 PM

December 8, 2020 at 5:27 PM

April 2, 2020 at 2:34 AM

Stephen Winks

RIABiz Directory

White Paper Postings

Special Sections

Common Tags

Recent Articles

Popular Writers

RIABiz

Directory

Archives

Connect