Jessica Devenyns

Clever.  Funny.  Interesting take on the situation, and it is understandable from the perspective of over the last 5+ years there have been rivers of money to fund fintech regardless of commercial viability.  LearnVest appears to be truly at the core of the company's evolution - regardless of whether the 'mission' of democratizing financial planning is fulfilled.  Lest we forget that investors need a return (always happens late in the cycle), the company was going to evolve one way or the other.  Take Wealthfront and the $250mm (I recall) in PE.  That firm will have to be about $500B in AUM (just quick math) to ever provide a decent return, which the current valuation anticipates.  At some point, the money party stops and the profits have to flow.  Or, lest we forget the party of 1999, the music stops and the company shuts down.

Quiet Northwestern Mutual may be ready to make a big noise with rerelease of LearnVest -- with Alexa von Tobel vowing that innovation and integration aren't mutually exclusive goals

Wealthfront

Betterment

Northwestern Mutual

LearnVest

Tim Schaefer

Karl Gouverner

John Gardner

Joel Bruckenstein

Jasen Yang

Alexa von Tobel

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

After the $250-million deal in 2015, the staid Milwaukee insurer has funneled funds into the jazzy robo, packed its board and taken it backstage for a makeover promised for the New Year

Quiet Northwestern Mutual may be ready to make a big noise with rerelease of LearnVest -- with Alexa von Tobel vowing that innovation and integration aren't mutually exclusive goals

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Quiet Northwestern Mutual may be ready to make a big noise with rerelease of LearnVest -- with Alexa von Tobel vowing that innovation and integration aren't mutually exclusive goals

RT2

Related Moves

September 8, 2023 at 11:58 PM

August 14, 2021 at 2:20 AM

January 19, 2021 at 6:32 PM

December 31, 2020 at 4:37 AM

RIABiz Directory

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