Goliath
A Goliath since 2001 claims to empower wealth management. How? By claiming that more than 59,000 financial advisors use their systems to manage $1.3 Trillion in client assets. By advertising that thousands of investment vehicles and hundreds of managers and strategists, and millions of investor accounts with over 27% of independent advisors and over 30% of large RIAs ‘trust’ them. By subtly suggesting that Goliath is positioned to benefit from the transformation of wealth management – growth in fee-based assets, support for fiduciary process, integrating platforms replacing legacy platforms and going as far as to say it increases efficiency and drives better outcomes… Helpful pay for play research adds further ‘credence’ by providing supportive numbers for “more clients served”, ” larger book of business”, “higher practice revenue/production”, ” more clients served”, ” doubled their book of business”, “more time for client management” et al.
David
ActiveAllocator aims to reshape the wealth management industry by resetting advisor and investor expectations about investment management and asset allocation advice, including where the best advice comes from, what it should cost, and how it is delivered. We are driven by an authentic mission: to increase expected returns for 33 million investors by eliminating the 20%-30% loss that’s built into the way the retail financial advice and investment management industry is currently structured. Our technology can remove the deadweight costs of $130 billion in strategic asset allocation inefficiency and drastically reducing the $260-$300 billion being paid in advisory fees , one individual portfolio at a time.
Goliath can’t and wont do that – for this is his Achilles heel.
We estimate that retail investors lose more than $400 billion annually in advisor fees and portfolio inefficiencies. This value destruction is both explicit in typical 1% or higher advisory fees charged and implicit in 0.5% or more asset allocation inefficiency. Moreover, these costs are in addition to other contracting frictions, product commissions and costs. To increase efficiency and serve a broader audience, advisors put investors in “model portfolios,” which commoditize and marginalize advisor service and expertise. Model portfolios also fail to adequately account for personal investment views, preferences and limitations. Worse still, clients rarely know how inefficient their allocations really are and have no objective means to measure and value advisor performance.
ActiveAllocator helps individual investors, financial advisors, and asset managers analyze existing allocations, discover inefficiencies, and create optimized bespoke portfolios – in 10 minutes, in 10 clicks and at 10 percent of the typical cost. ActiveAllocator allows users to (i) aggregate investment accounts and holdings across 15,000 financial institutions; (ii) search, recognize and automatically map over 4 million financial products and securities to granular 50 asset sub-classes; (iii) compare and validate their own market views with capital market assumptions from 10 Wall Street firms; (iv) personalize investing preferences across 10 dimensions; (v) optimize and construct bespoke portfolios; and, (vi) seamlessly execute rebalancing trade orders across a choice of brokerages.
ActiveAllocator addresses shortcomings endemic to asset allocation tools and services. Our open architecture encourages exploration and expression of advisor views, as well as express investor-specific preferences and constraints. Finally, ActiveAllocator allows advisors not only to deliver real value to clients, but to own the advice they provide and to quantify the direct benefits of their services.
In the battle between Goliath and David the outcome is pretty clear. Big is not better.
