Betterment has increased its assets under management (AUM) by approximately $1 billion in eight months; AUM is currently $6.2 billion; diversification to new client segments has significantly helped the firm to grow; beginning as a consumer focused platform, it now has a Betterment for Business platform with approximately 300 customers; the early expansion to businesses primarily underserved by legacy providers is likely to be an advantage for the firm as robo advisor offerings increase. Source
Money20/20 has it all. From Matt Gaetz roaming the halls of the Venetian, to a conference attendee who looks uncannily...
This week, I grapple with the concepts of financial centralization and decentralization, anchoring around custody, staking, and DeFi examples. On the centralized side, we look at BitGo's acquisition of Lumina, Coinbase Custody and its similarity to Schwab and Betterment Institutional. On the decentralized side, we examine the recent $500 million increase in value within the Compound protocol, as well as the recursive loops that could pose a broader financial risk to the ecosystem.
In this episode we talk with Sarah Levy, the CEO of Betterment, about investing, robo-advice, the banking crisis, gender diversity and much more.
Fintechs have started to follow the Fed and slash rates on savings accounts by an average of 1 percent; the...
·
“I regularly evaluate the companies out there that are AI native and trying to solve these problems: teams founded by...
Schwab Intelligent Portfolios now boasts $24 billion assets under management and has hired Cynthia Loh, the ex-general manager of Betterment for Business; article reports on Schwab’s robo-advice platform growth, the cannibalization the firm saw with the offering, and what the new hire might mean for Schwab’s future plans. Source
I examine the unbelievable transformation and restructuring happening in high finance. Global bank HSBC is planning to lay off over 10% of staff, looking at reductions of 35,000. E*TRADE is being acquired by Morgan Stanley, integrating its 5,000,000 accounts and $360 billion of assets into the Wall Street investment firm. Legg Mason and its $800 billion of assets are being folded into Franklin Templeton for $4.5 billion, less than what Visa had paid for fintech data aggregator Plaid and half of what Robinhood is likely valued privately. How do we make sense of these developments? How do we appeal to the heart?
We are like the hungry at the all-you-can-eat buffet. In the beginning, there is not enough! Let's democratize access to food; to music; to transportation; to healthcare; to finance; to payments; to banking; to lending; to investing. The billions in institutional capital across universities, pensions, and sovereigns are delegated to smart portfolio managers. The day before yesterday, it was allocated by small cap stock pickers (hi Warren!). Yesterday, it was the alternative managers of hedge funds and private equity. Today, it is the trading machine and the venture capitalist. Tomorrow, it is the cryptographic artificial intelligence.
In this conversation, we talk with Brian Barnes of M1 Finance, about finance “super apps”, the cost-efficiencies of robo-advisors, fractionalized share trading, and tackling the titans of the Wealth Management industry. We also discuss the nuts and bolts of the financial infrastructure making this possible.
M1 Finance bundles together roboadvisory, neobanking and lending into a single “super app”, allowing for combined pricing power (i.e., charging nothing on asset allocation). The firm currently has $3 billion in AUM, a growth of 50% in the past four months and tripling their total in just over a year. Notably, the company has its own broker/dealer and offers fractional shares, and partners with Lincoln Savings bank on the deposit accounts. That makes for a compelling business model from securities lending, interchange, and order flow.