The Future of Robo Advice
December 11, 2017 | Financial Advisor
DOUGLAS EU: If I take a step back on robos, I think for me, and I can’t remember where this comes from, but words are very important, right? So I don’t really know what a robo-advisor is because there’s not one thing that it is.
We have a stake in a robo-advisor in the U.K., small stake, and basically, it’s there for us to try to understand what that business is. And, for me, as I look at robo-advice, I think about the world very differently. I don’t think that what robo-advisors do is what anybody in this room is doing. Today, they’re not competitors and maybe that’s because they’re version 0.1 of what actually—they’re not really an advisor at this stage. They’re an electronic—in many cases, they’re an electronic platform to do the same things that you would normally do people-to-people.
That being said, there’s no doubt that the firms of the quote/unquote, robo-advisors will evolve their business model. So very much Amazon started selling books, today it’s the everything store. It’s moved along in terms of what is sold. And once they do, it’s selling its own product, now it’s a platform for others.
