Recent news of deposit products from Aspiration, SoFi and Wealthfront point to a wider trend in the market of fintech...
In the long take this week, I try out a contrarian point of view on personal finance chatbots. Trim, a savings chatbot, just withdrew support from Facebook Messenger. While lots of other chatbots are still invested in conversational banking, what could we take away from the counterfactual of chatbots failing to get B2C traction? What is the impact on the rest of the platform wars waged by Amazon, Google, and Tesla for connected homes, cars, and the Internet of Things?
The competition for deposits continues as Wealthfront has raised the interest rate on their cash account from 2.29% to 2.51%;...
What does the modern consumer want from their bank? According to Wealthfront they want less branches, more automation and a...
Cloudvirga Raises $50M in Series C Funding Student Loan Genius Raises $3.5M in Seed Series Prime Financing HSBC Partners with...
Andy Rachleff, CEO of Wealthfront, makes the case for automated advice and technology powered software; reports that Wealthfront's new system, Path, can analyze a client's spending and savings preferences through access to their accounts, creating financial plans in minutes; Wealthfront also has plans for adding artificial intelligence solutions to improve its services. Source
In fintech today many companies are expanding beyond their core product as they seek to serve their target market with...
This week, we look at:
Embedded finance as a growing theme with the $10B Affirm IPO and Stripe's launch of Treasury
The customer types that each of these firms is attempting to convert into their product, and what this tells us about economic growth
A framework for understanding the emerging value chain of digital finance, and the role of platforms and marketplaces
Digital wealth management fintech Wealthfront launched a high yield cash account in February and has already seen more than $1bn...
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.