One of the more popular areas, although perhaps not the largest by way of aggregate gross valuation, is the area of robo-advisory. Many will ultimately come to know FinTech through that channel. The definition of course once again is fuzzy, but it originally meant financially advisory businesses that reduce costs of client service by disintermediating humans. Now, multiple models have evolved over time, including what we call a bionic model that incorporates both technology and websites and enablement from the tech part of FinTech with, or coupled with, or grouped with human interactions. But we do see a very broad spectrum, ranging from pure machine to just slightly enabled bionic approaches. Today a loose definition is, a financial advisory firm, a practice that uses some kind of algorithm in some way to build an allocation for customers, to build an investment strategy approach. These approaches usually provide automated capture of client information that would include potentially know your client elements, that are so important in regulated space like financial advisory arenas. Financial goals, liquidity preferences, risk capacity to risk tolerance, or risk aversion its inverse, recommended allocations of individual investments, asset classes and so on. Automated re-balancing, tax loss harvesting and progress reporting on the way to financial plans, ultimately resulting in some kind of output to investors or clients, automated or otherwise. This polemic notion of a pure technologically enabled non-interactive robo-advisor, really does not exist in practice to my knowledge. I don't think at this point there's anything that is purely a robo. Two of the largest independent robos, Wealthfront and Betterment, both do have the ability for clients to get in touch with them. They have client service representatives and expanding business models that you might ultimately call bionic, although, they may wait them significantly different from say a broker dealer or a financial advisory firm that specifically blends the human and non-human. Sometimes we call it V clinical and actuarial approaches to advisory. The pure vision of robo advisory has not yet purely been achieved, in part because, it is so important for humans to touch humans, and we'll have more to say on that in just a moment. From the perspective broadly from industry, the robo models also are very important because it makes clients with potentially low levels of investable assets, economically viable to service. This is a very interesting and important theme throughout much of financial technologically enabled advisory, in part because of recent pushes toward a fiduciary standard in the investment advisory space, that would apply to brokers as well as investment advisors alike. Inducing a kind of pressure or impetus or motivation for certain players to segment their books as the cost of advice, is expected to arise. Sorry, to increase. This notion of costs increasing, may, although it's yet to be entirely settled, push higher cost per dollar clients more toward technologically enabled platforms where scale is possible as opposed to taking them on in person. One example which has grown dramatically recently, is the Vanguard personal advisor services which was re-branded after being around for a long time, a couple of years ago as a robo. By June of 2015, it had $21 billion of assets, as of the first quarter of 2019 it had almost 116 billion. By all accounts, it's the largest financial robo. Wealthfront, which is another top 10 firm, has about $11 billion of assets as of the first quarter of 2019. Betterment overtook Wealthfront AUM back in 2015, and we'll discuss that in a second, having about $16 billion as of the same mark to market. 90 percent of Wealthfront assets have been placed in vanguard funds as part of the underlying strategy across asset allocation categories. Betterment, in some sense, is viewed to have caught up with Wealthfront by pivoting its business model to emphasize defined contribution plan sales in smaller companies, which historically has not been the bailiwick of Wealthfront. Over the last several years, certain large brokerages and asset managers have acquired, built or develop robo-like offerings. Firms like Blackrock, Schwab, Merrill. Fidelity controls much of Betterment order flow, and of course, also earns referral fees in doing so.
