Brokerage firms have been dealing with their brokers leaving for lesser-known independent funds and startups. What’s behind this migration of talent and money from established, buttoned-up firms to laid-back startups like New York-based Betterment?
It may be because the startups know young people, and young people are the future of, well, everything.
Wealth management has been a luxury financial service for decades, but New York City-based startup Betterment wants to bring those same investing tools to those with lower net worths.
Bank Innovation spoke to Betterment founder and CEO Jon Stein about what separates Betterment from traditional wealth management. The company has seen growth and critical acclaim for its unconventional approach, says Stein.
“We’ve tried to make wealth management accessible to anyone,” he said. “There are a lot of smart tools for super wealthy, and accessibility to those tools is part of our core mission. We also have the best pricing in the industry with no minimum balances to make it even more accessible.”
While the company is popular among millennials, Stein says that Betterment has a “pretty broad” audience. “Smart professional is core customers — people who know enough to understand that they should be investing and how to go about it, and they understand previous technology have certain limitations.”
Stein expanded on the limitations in traditional wealth management systems, saying that high costs lead to barriers of entry, but that wasn’t the only issue. “Typically, [traditional wealth management systems] offer poor advice that underperforms and don’t focus on things that [users] should be doing to manage taxes or reduce risk. Most don’t do that — they do nothing in terms of tax management and encourage bad decisions because that leads to more trade volume. We’re aligned with our customers, we don’t charge our customers for transactions. When their money grows, we grow as well.”
Betterment hopes that now is the time for a cheap alternative to wealth management system to take off, thanks to the growing popularity of exchange traded funds, that there’s enough liquidity in the market to enable the platform, and using new technology like Amazon Web Services to reduce costs. But, Stein says that the there’s customer experiences should be mor
There are some other differences between Betterment and other startups, namely on the technology side. Betterment is the world’s first vertically integrated platform for trading, portfolio’s, and ETF’s. Stein likened this to Apple and how the tech giant builds both the hardware and software for their devices. “Wealth management companies have underinvested in in terms of technology for a long time.”
The company has raised $45 million in total, including a $35 million Series C round that closed in May 2014, and is planning on expanding its existing office in midtown Manhattan. By using and leveraging its technology and vertical integration, Betterment hopes that it can bring wealth management into the 21st century.