Brooke Southall

Brooke, you might have been joking about “phono-advisors,” but it’s actually a real thing.

&lt;a href="http://www.phonoadvisor.com" rel="nofollow"&gt;http://www.phonoadvisor.com/&lt;/a&gt;

Bill,

That is too funny. Right in my backyard.

Brooke

Really enjoyed the article Brooke. 

Bill, that site sure looks like a parody. Does Orion Software now actually provide “phono-advice” or are they just having a lot of fun with the “phono-advisor” concept?

Looking more closely, I have to say that personally I can’t wait to get a pair of their “special PhonoAdvisor-branded glasses”. Brilliant.

Interesting … yesterday the http://www.phonoadvisor.com url went to a site that I, too, thought was an “Onion-like” spoof. Just now (twice) when I clicked the link in Bill Winterberg’s post, it redirects to a WordPress site owned by Coastal Advisors (but the content has been moved behind a log in wall): http://phonoadvisor.com/wp-login.php?redirect_to=%2F

Glad you guys enjoyed the parody. Just having some fun during our Fuse weekend. Lots of really cool real stuff came out of the weekend and it’s well worth following the #fuseutah hashtag on twitter.

Note: coastal capital is a faux advisory firm used in demos and is in no way a real advisor

Please note the big phono advisors are brand names (Merrill, Vanguard, Schwab) or they have a substantial presence on the Internet – for example Ken Fisher and his Forbes relationship. There are numerous advisory firms that are evolving into the Robo/Phono business models. Their success will be impacted by credibility that can be validated on the Internet. If they are invisible on the Internet they will be limited to boiler room-like operations.

The documented RIA threat, 'phono-advisors' and their nearly $300 billion of assets

Ken Fisher has been trying to tell anyone who would listen.

Fisher Investments

Vanguard

Merrill Edge

NestWise

Ken Fisher

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

Not much romantic about call center-based advisors but under banners like Vanguard, Fisher Investments or Merrill Edge, they are a force to be reckoned with

The documented RIA threat, 'phono-advisors' and their nearly $300 billion of assets

Bill Winterberg

Brooke Southall

Dan Warburton

Scott Horton

Dan Warburton

Marie Swift

Jud Mackrill

Jack Waymire

Related Moves

December 3, 2022 at 3:16 AM

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