It was billed as “The Future of Financial Advice: Man vs. Machine,” a debate held Tuesday at the Inside ETFs conference in Hollywood, Fla., between two sides of the financial advisory divide—traditional financial advisors and robo-advisors, a catch-all name for the automated investment services that have proliferated in recent years and which some people believe are a threat to the traditional human-based advisor model.
The “man” in this case was noted financial advisor Ric Edelman, who squared off against the “machine” embodied by Adam Nash, CEO of Wealthfront, which claims to be the largest robo-advisor with $1.8 billion in assets.
Given the packed audience in the large assembly hall, it had the feel of the advisory world’s version of an Ali vs. Frazier boxing match. And while Nash floated like a butterfly with his informative descriptions of Wealthfront’s capabilities and goals, it was Edelman who stung like a bee with his blunt assessments of the potentially devastating impact robo-advisors could have on the existing advisor model, and how advisors must keep up with technology or die.
But first, some pre-debate introductions. Wealthfront is a three-year-old, Palo Alto, Calif.-based company whose growth in assets and mindshare among investors gives it a buzz typically associated with other young technology turks from Silicon Valley that are seen as being a disruptive force in their particular industry.
Nash, who said he was a Wealthfront client before he joined the company two years ago, described Wealthfront as a simple and transparent service providing personalized portfolio management layered with certain investment strategies previously available only to ultra-wealthy folks, such as tax-loss harvesting.
“And we do it at an incredibly low price—it’s free under $10,000, and we charge just one-quarter of 1 percent for amounts above that,” he said.
Nash noted the generational tilt in Wealthfront’s client base––65 percent of its customers are under the age of 35, and 90 percent are under age 50. Client portfolios range from between $5,000 and $10 million in assets, and the average portfolio is worth $90,000.
“That’s far below the minimums at most RIA practices,” Nash said. “We like to think we’re bringing sophisticated financial advice to a large new generation of investors, and we’re exceptionally bullish on the idea that this millennial generation will be a large economic force in this country and they’ll have a different idea of the types of services they’ll want from financial advisors.”
Ric Edelman, on the other hand, probably doesn’t need much introduction among advisors. That said, he’s chairman and CEO of Edelman Financial Services LLC, a traditional investment management firm with 39 offices across the country and about 115 advisors serving 26,000 clients. The firm’s client account minimum is $5,000, and the average account size is roughly $500,000.
“Our target audience is the mass affluent, though we do have a large number of high-net-worth clients,” he said.