Brooke Southall

Seems like the robos and their VCs need to look behind them for the puck.  Relationship management and sales are difficult to automate.  Few wealth advisors I know need to use the line "it's just a Coke a day" to generate new business.

I suspect we ARE in the eye of the storm and many are lining up to ponder what's next.  My take is that it's probably NOT more integration with the traditional industry, nor is it getting millenials to invest $6/day instead of $5.  There are interesting developments on the horizon that further meld traditional industries of financial planning, wealth management and insurance to deliver what most savers really want; which is to meet their financial goals in a fairly predictable manner at low cost.

We need to add that the investor is always right. Sallie walks the client is always right path better than most. Hopefully she pivots.

Robo-advisors hit lull in everything but VC backing as reality fragments their identity

Wealthfront

Ellevest

Schwab Intelligent Portfolios

Autonomous Research

Jason Kilar

Sallie Krawcheck

Walt Bettinger

Andy Rachleff

Lex Sokolin

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

<p>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.</p> 

<p>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.</p>

Women of Wealth Management

A Silicon Valley venture capitalist lectures Sallie Krawcheck on drawbacks of human advisors after she explains she needs capital to hire some

Robo-advisors hit lull in everything but VC backing as reality fragments their identity

Related Moves

December 31, 2020 at 4:37 AM

August 14, 2021 at 2:20 AM

July 3, 2020 at 1:12 AM

July 24, 2019 at 12:53 AM

Jeff Spears

Brian Murphy

Jeff Spears

RIABiz Directory

White Paper Postings

Special Sections

Common Tags

Recent Articles

Popular Writers

RIABiz

Directory

Archives

Connect