John Ndege, founder and CEO of Pocket Risk, is predicting a collapse in the world of robo-advisors.

Many financial advice providers are purchasing robo-advisors or building their own robo-like tools in hopes of rapidly acquiring and onboarding new clients, a tactic that Ndege says is unlikely to succeed.

“Investment management is already being commoditized; advisors are struggling to establish differentiation, and they’re doing it in the wrong way,” says Ndege. “Why should someone work with one advisor rather than another based on technology or a risk-tolerance questionnaire? This part of the process is not a prospecting element. Client acquisition, planning and portfolio allocation are nuanced activities.”

As robo-advisors fail to meet the industry's client acqusition expectations, most will be altered or scrapped to favor personalized, human-led financial advice.

On Tuesday, Ndege announced a complete re-launch of his software, Pocket Risk 2, a digital risk tolerance questionnaire that attempts to holistically measure an individual’s risk tolerance and capacity.

The Pocket Risk’s advisor clientele is mostly U.S.-based, represents multiple industry segments and manages over $35 billion. In its new format, the tool incorporates aspects of behavioral finance in measuring client sentiment towards risk.

Rather than an engine of efficiency, Ndege presents Pocket Risk as a tool to make financial advice more effective. According to Ndege, trust and awareness are the largest barriers between the advice industry and new client acquisition, not technology. Thus, advisors would be better served focusing on delivering financial plans rather than building the next great client portal or onboarding application.

“There’s been too much focus on these quantitative tools,” says Ndege. “Advisors are under fee pressure, there are fewer products that generate revenues, and they’re in a difficult situation. They’re probably thinking ‘our solution is to get more clients by creating more technology,’ but that’s not really their challenge. The primary determinant of an investor’s success is their behavior and their ability to stick with a plan.”

Most risk-tolerance questionnaires, particularly the ones attached to commoditized robo-advisors, only measure a client’s risk tolerance -- how much risk a client is willing to take. The hope is that by understanding a client’s risk tolerance, an advice provider may determine the maximum amount of risk that may be taken in a strategy that the client would be likely to stay with over the long term -- an oversimplified view of investor behavior, says Ndege. “Our tools are designed to help advisors learn about the client’s behavior and sentiment. You can’t do that by asking two or three questions before throwing someone into a portfolio.”

The bridge between information gathering and plan execution is still best built by an advisor, says Ndege, as a roboadvisor’s limited investment strategies may not fit the nuances of an individual’s personality. Clients may also struggle to trust plans designed by an algorithm.

That may explain why companies like Betterment have decided to add call centers of human advisors to their service offerings, says Ndege.

“I think these tools are helpful, but they don’t really do much to bolster the trust element between the client and the advice they receive or to add face to the advisor,” says Ndege.

Professional advisors deliver value by designing plans intended to both achieve long-term financial goals and behavioral interventions that help investors stay on track, says Ndege. By determining a client’s risk capacity and goals and asking certain behavioral finance questions, Pocket Risk creates a better psychological profile with more action points for advisors.

For example, Pocket Risk asks whether clients tend to stick to the plans they make and the goals they set -- clients who have difficulty staying the course may require more direct attention from their advisor, especially during down markets.

Pocket Risk also asks clients about their ability to save, their ability to weather emergencies like a job loss or a health crisis, and how they currently allocate their assets.

Ndege says that tools that take a more comprehensive view of an investor’s relationship with risk can help advisors spend more time developing their behavioral value proposition.

“Successful financial planning is all about the long game,” says Ndege. “Technological tools should be about helping advisors educate clients so they can make the right decisions about their finances, and to understand client risk levels so that when a market crash does come, they feel secure.”

Ndege argues that in the end, advisors may want to resist the urge to accelerate the client acquisition process by making it purely digital. Rather than adopt technologies that make their services resemble commoditized robo-advisors, advisors should find tools that enhance their ability to create financial plans.

“Technology is great because it can help advisors to be more efficient, but advisors must also think about being more effective,” says Ndege. “You have to find the right balance.”