In this episode we talk with Sarah Levy, the CEO of Betterment, about investing, robo-advice, the banking crisis, gender diversity and much more.
PeerStreet has partnered with Betterment to provide increased access to its platform data for investors through the Betterment service; with the new partnership investors can now view their PeerStreet positions on the Betterment dashboard; the partnership is facilitated by data integration from Quovo. Source
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.
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.
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?
Through the partnership, the firm hopes to provide more personalization to their over 270,000 users; both portfolios were vetted by Betterment to ensure quality and affordability standards; Dan Egan, director of behavioral finance investments at Betterment stated, “We wanted to get these strategies out to our clients as quickly as possible, rather than build them out ourselves.” Source
Mastercard expands cryptocurrency program to allow more firms to issue cards on its network Inside Betterment’s move into banking with...
Robo advisors have quickly become a must have product for banks as they look to offer their customers comparable products...
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.
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