Tag: Personal Capital
Posted on June 3, 2020
The Emergence and Spread of Robo Advice
Robo advice as we know it today first emerged into the mainstream in 2008 when Betterment and Wealthfront were founded and later launched digitally managed portfolios with low fees and minimums. In 2015, Schwab launched its Schwab Intelligent Portfolios and Vanguard launched its Personal Advisor Services. Since then, robo-advice products have become ubiquitous among financial institutions. Here, we intend to take a look back at the industry, how its evolution is impacting individual investors, and what investors can expect next from these innovative products.
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Posted on December 6, 2019
Robo advisors are a high-tech solution to investment management, enabling individuals to invest in a professionally managed and diversified portfolio in less than 30 minutes. As robo offerings have proliferated, a select group has stood out for its wide breadth of technology. The startups who brought the technology to the public nearly a decade ago—Wealthfront, Betterment, and Personal Capital—offer easy-to-use platforms packed with integrated technologies.
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Posted on November 11, 2019
Cash Products Attract Assets
Wealthfront and Betterment have both hit $20 billion worth of assets on their platform. On its website, Wealthfront boasts that its “clients trust [it] with more than $21 billion” as of November 2019. However, regulatory filings suggest that most of this growth has been the result of cash moving into high-yield savings accounts.
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Posted on November 6, 2019
Prudential, Axos Invest, and Acorns Lead YTD
Amongst our taxable robos, Prudential, Axos Invest (formerly WiseBanyan), and Acorns are the top performers YTD for performance above/below the Normalized Benchmark. All three portfolios have above-average allocations to domestic stocks, which have outperformed international equities consistently over the past three years. Axos Invest has emerged as a long-term performance leader, proving that a simple portfolio can achieve strong long-term performance. Axos’s domestic equity allocation relies almost entirely on the Vanguard Total Stock Market ETF, and their fixed income consists of high-yield and investment-grade corporate bonds.
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Posted on September 27, 2019
As the digital advice industry has grown, acquiring more customers and assets, providers have expanded their role from automated investment managers to digital bankers. A major component of this shift has been the offering of high-yield cash accounts. Betterment, Wealthfront, Ally, Personal Capital, Wealthsimple and SoFi offer these accounts, which have APYs of at least 1.80% and carry FDIC insurance. Personal Capital and SoFi accounts are FDIC insured up to $1.5M—six times the coverage of a savings account opened at a traditional bank. Wealthfront and Betterment offer $1M of FDIC insurance. Robos partner with numerous banks, take in users’ deposits, and spread those deposits across partner banks. This process allows high-yield cash accounts to provide insurance beyond the standard $250K.
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Posted on September 21, 2019
When digital investing was first introduced, platforms quickly began accumulating assets. Digital advisors were labeled industry disruptors, as talks of fee compression, the commoditization of professional asset management, and disruption of the investment advice industry ran rampant. Digital advice providers had the advantage of emerging during a historic multi-year bull market. Over the last four years, the market has continued to mature, adoption has spread across major financial institutions, and new consumer trends have emerged. An increasing number of companies are battling for market share and institutions have developed their own offerings. In the race to achieve scale, the largest independent advisors continue to expand product offerings to stay a step ahead of incumbent players and maintain impressive rates of asset accumulation.
