Betterment General Counsel Ben Alden told the Securities and Exchange Commission’s Fintech Forum Monday if Donald Trump kills the Department of Labor’s fiduciary rule, it won’t hurt robo advisors.

But SEC Investor Advocate Rick Fleming said a swift stock market collapse could.

SEC Investor Advocate Rick Fleming predicted 10 years from now 2016 will be viewed as a dinosaur era in financial services.

“Robos have not been tested with severe market downturn. Will investors be able to access their funds?” questioned Fleming.

He added robos would also be disadvantaged in a stock upheaval because there is a lot of benefit to the human touch to calm the waters when the market turns down.

As the most widely publicized robo-advisor, Betterment was seen by many as a major beneficiary of the fiduciary rule since the best-interest standard was said to harm human advisory firms, which would be beset by added costs.

Labor Secretary Tom Perez has repeatedly praised Betterment for offering inexpensive, unconflicted investment recommendations.

Alden said Betterment’s growth prospects won’t change if the fiduciary rule is done away with because most workers don’t have sufficient wealth to afford the services of a human-reliant firm.

Speaking at and after the SEC’s first Fintech Forum, the Betterment executive said he thinks the term “robo advisor” is going to fade away.

“It’s but a technological way of delivering high-quality services,” said Alden.

With its direct-to-advisor platform, Alden said Betterment can help small advisory firms provide better service to their clients from planning to behavior management.

“There is a lot advisors can do with it,” he said.

Robos are just the tip of the fintech iceberg for financial advisors, said Ernst & Young Financial Services Office Principal Nikhil Lele.

The emerging technology will let advisors look at all their clients’ data in one place and help them make informed decisions on everything from insurance to charitable giving.

Advisors must do a lot more than just make than investment recommendations, said the EY consultant.

With the knowledge of fintech, customers will be expecting much more from their advisors as well, said Lele, including access to them in every way conceivable, from video phone to texts to email to in-person visits.

During the forum, said CFA Institute Capital Markets Policy Group Head Jim Allen said CFA is worried robos may not give clients the personal advice they want.

But he said this can be a problem with human advisors, too.

Allen said robos have the ability to help give clients more personal advice when algorithms learn their individual preferences and needs over time.

SEC Chair Mary Jo White, said automated financial advice can significantly benefit investors by giving them broad and more affordable access to the markets.

“Fintech is well on its way to becoming an important part of the securities industry,” she said.

At the same time, Chair White, who announced her departure in January following the forum, said it’s important fintech doesn’t facilitate risk and harm for investors.

She added her staff is looking at how advisors with little human intervention with clients can provide appropriate disclosures.

CrowdCheck CEO Sara Hanks said multi-state crowdfunding has gotten off to a bumpy start in the six months since the SEC authorized it.

She said retail investors have gotten the message they can lose all their money, with their biggest problem being a lack of understanding of the nature of dilution, that with crowdfunding they can have a smaller piece of a bigger pie.

Hanks said she has seen horrendous things happen with accounting for firms raising money through crowdfunding, like accountants getting the names of companies wrong in three places.

“There is a lot of low-cost accounting going on,” said the CrowdCheck co-founder.

North American Securities Administrators Association Corporate Finance Chair Michael Pieciak said 34 states have crowdfunding implemented or are working on it.

One of the difficulties that he said investors are going to encounter is not getting their calls and emails answered.

“Investor relations is the last thing on the entrepreneurs’ minds when they are trying to meet payrolls,” said Pieciak.

He predicted online borrowing will be more popular for businesses than raising equity via the web. With debt, it is easier for both the business owners and investors to know what money is coming in and when, while not messing up their time line.

Marketplace (online) lending is beset with a spaghetti soup of regulators, said former Small Business Administration Administrator Karen Mills.

“They have to work together,” said Mills.

When they do (and in 10 years she predicted they will), Mills said there could be tremendous progress towards bringing about a small biz “utopia” coming with online funding access to equity and loans at affordable rates.

 “The technology is there. The innovators are there. The regulators need to keep up,” she said.

Blockchain networks, which are being designed to let all parties in a transaction history view all the data and history of a transaction at once and eliminate middlemen in securities trading, could benefit individual investors through cost savings and providing them with the ability to see that someone is looking out for their best interests, Nasdaq Chief Information Officer Brad Peterson said.