Robo adviser Wealthfront has announced in a blog post that it will expand its product offering to include loans; the firm is one of the premier robo advisers in the US; through a partnership with RBC Capital Markets, Wealthfront has uniquely designed a lending product for its current clients with at least $100,000; loans can be issued for approximately 30% of a client's account value. Source
In fintech today many companies are expanding beyond their core product as they seek to serve their target market with...
Digital wealth fintech Wealthfront is taking another step towards becoming a bank with their new and improved Cash Account; the...
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.
Tiger Global has led Wealthfront’s latest $75 million round; the capital will be used to further build out their Path platform which connects users to their other financial accounts; Wealthfront now has $9 billion under management. Source
Andy Rachleff, the CEO of Wealthfront argues that managed real estate funds perform poorly compared to low cost ETFs like Vanguard's REIT Index Fund; Fundrise's CEO Benjamin Miller responded in a blog post, writing "Less competitive, inefficient markets mean an investor can generally buy comparable assets at lower prices than efficient markets. With Shiller price-to-earnings (PE) ratios at all-time historic highs only seen in 1929 and 2001, more than ever investors need to find ways to invest at a reasonable cost basis."; Miller also argues that long term investors are paying a premium for the liquidity that ETFs offer, something that these investors don't need. Source
Cloudvirga Raises $50M in Series C Funding Student Loan Genius Raises $3.5M in Seed Series Prime Financing HSBC Partners with...
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?
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
Recent news of deposit products from Aspiration, SoFi and Wealthfront point to a wider trend in the market of fintech...