Lisa Shidler

Was this proofread by a chimp and fact checked by a fourth grader? This is embarrassing for RIABiz.

If Northwestern Mutual wishes to broaden its capabilities beyond insurance, annuities and disability insurance, the disciplines of financial planning and investments makes sense in empowering their agents, who are excellent salesmen. Robo advice is the ideal application as it introduces technical competency in managing a broad range of investment and administrative values outside of the normal course of insurance brokerage. The simplification of advisory services without denigration of fiduciary duty, through expert authenticated (back to statute) prudent process and advanced technology is the route the entire industry will take. The new fiduciary standard advanced by Mary Jo white in the next few weeks will require a more modern approach to portfolio construction, heavily reliant on 'Robo Advice”, 

Great move by Northwestern, but is it getting expert authenticated advice and professional standing? LearnVest and NaviPlan must demonstrate their technical competency which is now more geared toward a loose suitability standard and product sales. The difficult part is Northwestern and its insurance agents thinking of themself as an advisory firm, not a product firm.

SCW

The real reasons Northwestern Mutual paid a reported $250 million for LearnVest

Tim Schaefer: There are actionable 'to-dos' for the clients. The client can make progress on the plan.

NaviPlan

Northwestern Mutual

LearnVest

Joel Bruckenstein

Alexa von Tobel

Tim Shaefer

Phil Cunningham

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 is many good things but integrated from a gender standpoint is not one of them. This is not so great. Women are the majority of humanity and they have an asset-building strategy that can't be beat. Women outlive their beer-and-steak mates and end up with big estates. But today's women have too another strategy -- pursuing wealth in the workplace. Yet when they go to find fellow women to talk all this through with, they don't readily find them. 

Companies big and small have for decades fallen over themselves to say that they have women's initiatives but I can't think of one that has amounted to much. But there are stories-- dozens or hundreds -- of them about women exerting their influence on this business and we are starting to collect them. It's a starting place -- documenting the ground being covered by women in the form of engaging tales graphically depicted by the physiognomy of the fairer sex.

Women of Wealth Management

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

With $2.7 billion in cash to burn after the Russell Investments spin-off, the Milwaukee-based company was simply an old-line insurer with desktop software in search of a planning pedigree 

The real reasons Northwestern Mutual paid a reported $250 million for LearnVest

Related Moves

November 20, 2019 at 10:19 PM

PlannerGuy

Stephen Winks

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