Oisin Breen

It will be interesting to observe what the client demand is for Mega - RIAs moving forward. There are some benefit to big, but there are some drawbacks also. I'm not sure that HNW clients want to see the names of Independent RIAs on the sides of blimps and stadiums. I've always seen that part of the allure is in the heritage of RIAs and the "Boutique" aspect. There is a lot of value in Boutique that is fairly straightforward for folks to understand. I looked up Boutique in Websters dictionary:
&lt;a href="https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/boutique" rel="nofollow"&gt;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/boutique&lt;/a&gt;

a small company that offers highly specialized services or products
boutique wineries
an independent investment boutique

I think the challenge is achieving desired growth while still maintaining some of the  unique value propositions that come with being Boutique and Independant.

Maybe they should focus on making the product work first. My accounts stopped linking months ago and support has yet to provide me with an answer

Explored them as an option for wealth management after being satisfied with their financial dashboards. They were unable to answer questions, and unwilling to disclose to me what investments they would be making until after I handed over a 600k 401k account.  Sorry, I am the customer. You need to earn my trust and not the other way around.

If they had $8B on 12/31/2018, and a normal globally diversified portfolio is up 20% in 2019, then the market grew AUM to $9.6B - so $1.6B of growth was not from their marketing efforts.

"We’ve grown by over $3 billion to more than $11 billion since year end 2018," he says. "In a word, our strategy is: grow."

Personal Capital keeps hiring move-the-needle executives, but the growth rate -- enviable to many -- is still pretty flat, if an IPO is in its future

Personal Capital

Jay Shah

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

The Redwood City, Calif. virtual RIA hired its third ‘growth executive’ to stoke demand

Personal Capital keeps hiring move-the-needle executives, but the growth rate -- enviable to many -- is still pretty flat, if an IPO is in its future

Related Moves

March 22, 2019 at 7:55 PM

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