Brooke Southall

Labelling Hardeep Walia as charismatic is a gross mischaracterization.  He had a 39% approval rating on Glassdoor and is know to berate and lie to employees.

I understood exactly what Motif was about and why I cared; not every investor has $2000 to purchase a share of Amazon or any of the other "high" priced securities.  Motifs allowed us an opportunity to participate in these companies using fractional shares.  I will use Folio but I prefer Motif's site better; it's more user friendly.

This shop ran super top heavy - worse than even Envestnet. Those execs are costly and cause an eye popping burn rate. Tech startups that succeed don’t hire fat lazy entitled middle management that can’t roll up their sleeves and do real work. This one did just that.

A look at their roster of execs was the first clue years ago that this company is misallocating capital.

And once you had commission free trading and a robo pivot, it was about relevance.  Motif who?

Next fintech failure coming up - it’s Ellevest.

I'm really surprised Envestnet wasn't all over this deal - I feel like they are the go-to buyer for fintech plays. Maybe no longer with the regime change.

After much acclaim but not enough profits, Motif shutters and sells itself off for parts with Folio buying the RIA and retail accounts

Folio Institutional

Motif

Greg Vigrass

Hardeep Walia

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 $850 million stock-basket company in San Mateo, Calif.  had success but -- $126 million invested by Goldman Sachs, Renren and Sallie Krawcheck and others -- not enough to justify business as usual

After much acclaim but not enough profits, Motif shutters and sells itself off for parts with Folio buying the RIA and retail accounts

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