New York-based Betterment for Advisors is giving its users more tools to manage their portfolios.
Betterment, the largest stand-alone robo-advisor with over $13 billion in AUM, announced on Wednesday the Flexible Portfolio, a new strategy that will for the first time allow users to control asset class weights within core portfolios, which means advisors on the firm’s platform can now choose how money is distributed within their clients’ accounts.
“We’re now going to allow advisors to express their views, and this feature will still leverage all the technology that Betterment offers, like tax-loss harvesting and tax-coordinated portfolios,” said Cara Reisman, head of Betterment for Advisors. “We’ve heard from advisors that our technology helps them save time, but that there should be more that we can do around portfolio customization without fully moving towards an open architecture system.”
Betterment’s core portfolios, while not static, have not been adjustable by financial advisors until the release of the Flexible Portfolio. The feature is also being rolled out for Betterment’s retail client base on a more limited basis.
Not only will advisors be able to include their own preferences and insights in client portfolios, but they will also be able to personalize a client’s holdings to account for assets held elsewhere, like company stock in within a retirement plan, the company said.
Advisors will also be able to use Flexible Portfolio to incorporate two additional asset classes not previously available in Betterment’s core portfolios: international REITs and high-yield bonds.
“We’ve heard a lot of feedback from advisors around those two asset classes,” said Reisman, who added that the new asset classes would not be available to retail users.--