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.
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.
Ant Financial’s Yu’e Bao previously had the title for the largest money market fund; however, JPMorgan and Fidelity have now...
Cambridge announced a joint research effort between the Cambridge Center for Alternative Finance and 16 private sector leaders.
Fidelity has launched a new data sharing hub called Akoya in a bid to end screen scraping and clarify data...
A new survey by Fidelity found 36 percent of U.S. and European institutional investors own crypto assets with Bitcoin being...
Another Profitable Year for Marlette Funding as Best Egg Surpasses $7B of Personal Loans Blockchain RegTech Startup TRM Secures $1.7...
Pat White, the founder of crypto enterprise startup Bitwave, said programmable money and its infrastructure will change traditional institutions.
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.
Fidelity’s chief executive Abigail Johnson spoke about the company’s current projects involving cryptocurrency at the Consensus conference; they have made venture investments and are also looking at applications of blockchain technology; Fidelity has set up a mining operation which is making money for the company. Source