Fidelity

Crypto decentralized finance Investing roboadvisor

·May. 11, 2020

$700B Franklin Templeton buys wealth tech AdvisorEngine, while digital investing DeFi revolution only starting

This week, I pause to reflect on the sales of (1) AdvisorEngine to Franklin Templeton and (2) the technology of Motif Investing to Schwab. Is all enterprise wealth tech destined to be acquired by financial incumbents? Has the roboadvisor innovation vector run dry? Not at all, I think. If anything, we are just getting started. Decentralized finance innovators like Zapper, Balancer, TokenSets, and PieDAO are re-imagining what wealth management looks like on Ethereum infrastructure. Their speed of iteration and deployment is both faster and cheaper, and I am more excited for the future of digital investing than ever before.

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Fintech News Roundup USA

·Feb. 20, 2020

Fidelity Spins Out Data-Sharing Unit

Akoya is currently Fidelity’s data-sharing arm but now will become its own company, owned by Fidelity, The Clearing House and...

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asset management big tech digital transformation Investing roboadvisor

·Nov. 25, 2019

Implications of Schwab’s $26 billion acquisition of TD Ameritrade, and Tesla’s black swan truck

Well this morning started out as a bit of a bummer! See -- Charles Schwab to buy TD Ameritrade in a $26 billion all-stock deal. The $55 billion market cap Schwab is gobbling up the $22 billion TD Ameritrade at a slight premium. Matt Levine of Bloomberg has a great, cynical take on the question: Schwab lowering its trading commissions to zero is actually what wiped out $4 billion off TD's marketcap a few months ago. For Schwab, the revenue loss from trading was 7% of total, while for TD it was over 20%. Once Schwab dropped prices, TD started trading at a discount and became an acquisition target. You can see the share price drops reflected below in the beginning of October.

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Crypto Investing roboadvisor

·Dec. 10, 2021

Investing in real estate, crypto, and startups using your retirement account, with Rocket Dollar CEO Henry Yoshida

In this conversation, we chat with Henry Yoshida – Co-Founder & Chief Executive Officer, Rocket Dollar. Prior to Rocket Dollar, Yoshida was the co-founder of Honest Dollar, a robo-advisor retirement platform that was acquired by Goldman Sachs, as well as a founder of MY Group LLC, a $2.5-billion assets under management investment firm. Henry shares his industry expertise as a speaker at several industry conferences, as well as having been featured or quoted in the Wall Street Journal, TechCrunch, Bloomberg Businessweek, and Financial Times. Henry has a passion for helping people be the best that they can be and contributes as a member in several financial and technology industry organizations. He graduated from The University of Texas at Austin and has an MBA from Cornell University.

More specifically, we touch on Henry’s career at BoA Merrill Lynch, his role at building a multi-billion dollar RIA business, how he started a digital retirement account platform called Honest Dollar which was sold to Goldman Sach’s neobank Marcus, the inception of Rocket Dollar, we talk IRAs and 401ks and how important these are for the current Gen-Z market, and so so much more!

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Fintech News Roundup USA

·Aug. 4, 2017

Lend Academy Article: Goldman Sachs Is Going Big on Lending

Goldman Sachs has been offering more products to a wider range of consumers; this started with the acquisition of the online deposit platform of GE Capital; the firm is competing aggressively on their deposit rates to grow this base; in 2016 they launched Marcus, their online lending platform, and now have a new lending product called GS Select; product offers loans backed by investment portfolios for individuals that have a Fidelity financial adviser. Source

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Fintech News Roundup USA

·Mar. 2, 2020

Robinhood Reports System-Wide Outage

Robinhood is currently experiencing a system-wide outage and follows news of other recent outages; Fidelity and Charles Schwab both had...

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asset management digital transformation neobank

·Feb. 24, 2020

Financial Empires fall — HSBC to fire 35,000; E*TRADE sells to Morgan Stanley for $13B

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?

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entrepreneurship exchanges / cap mkts Investing marketing roboadvisor

·Aug. 20, 2021

Altruist CEO Jason Wenk on WealthTech, financial planning, advice, and generally improving financial health

In this conversation, we chat with Jason Wenk, who is the Founder & CEO at Altruist. Apart from this Jason is a writer, self-proclaimed math geek, and investment systems developer. He began his career at Morgan Stanley in NYC at age 20, working on investment research and asset management systems development. After this Jason founded FormulaFolios: quantitative, computer-driven investment models based on academic research to help remove emotion from investing. FormulaFolios would later develop into a standalone asset manager and go on to rank as a fastest-growing private company by Inc. magazine 4 years in a row, reaching as high as #10 in 2017.

More specifically, we discuss all things wealth tech, as well as, serving people with financial planning, financial advice, and generally improving their financial health.

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Crypto DAOs decentralized finance digital securities / STO

·Jun. 22, 2020

Everyone should trade the billions in DeFi Structured Products! Or do digital asset derivatives need custodians and regulators?

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.

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