According to a November 2020 survey from FactSet in association with global professional services firm Aon, 54% of HNW clients’ wealth management activities worldwide took place online during the height of the pandemic. And 50% of respondents said that digital wealth management is a better use of their time. But too much digital can alienate HNW clients.

The growth of investment robo-advisors—algorithm-based account services—spiked last year across the US, the UK, and Canada as investors, especially those belonging to younger populations, took advantage of investment opportunities during the pandemic. For instance, independent robo-advisors Wealthfront and Betterment both reported double-digit increases in account openings during the pandemic.

Wealthsimple has secured $559M in funding at a $3.7B valuation thanks to the success of its retail trading and new crypto and P2P money transfer products. The Canadian fintech should now roll out customized portfolio options to double down on growth.

In an increasingly crowded US robo-advisory market, these new offerings should help Wealthfront stand out and grow its assets under management. The new portfolio customization capabilities will broaden the appeal of Wealthfront’s platform.

Report: The US Wealth Management Ecosystem. Article: Betterment takes over Wealthsimple’s US client book amid market saturation. Article: More boomers retired in 2020 than any other year.

What is the hybrid robo-advisor model, and what are its benefits compared with the conventional wealth management approach, and the fully digital model? What does a mature hybrid model look like, and what are key offerings?

North American wealth managers’ assets under management (AUM) is expected to increase in the best-case scenario to $73.3 trillion by 2025, up 26.4% from $58 trillion in 2020. Part of this increase can be attributed to the US HNWI demographic growing 11% in 2019, which has helped Addepar grow in parallel. The pandemic accelerated demand for its cloud-based solutions.

Wealthsimple struggled to gain a foothold in the US digital wealth management market since its 2017 launch, and its AUM was dwarfed by players such as Betterment and Wealthfront.

Despite the views of JPMorgan’s top boss, its clients have been clamoring for crypto as an investment, wealth-management division leader Mary Callahan Erdoes said to Bloomberg.

The UK banking giant will use Embark’s digital solutions and products to advance its position in the retirement and wealth management space. Retirement. Lloyds will give its retirement and life insurance arm, Scottish Widows, a boost by both optimizing its distribution channel and digitizing its retirement accounts.

For example, a 2020 Deloitte survey found that respondents were more likely to prefer branches for services such as wealth management (62%) and mortgages (69%)—as opposed to routine offerings like credit cards (44%) and managing their checking accounts (54%).

When a bank becomes an interface, rather than a place, AI will enable banks to deliver bespoke insights that underpin their budgeting, wealth management, or personal financial management solutions.

The fintech, which provides digital ID solutions, operates across industries, but it focuses on financial services, including banking, cryptocurrencies, foreign exchange, and wealth management. Trulioo can currently verify 5 billion consumers and 330 million businesses in real time—and it’s working to reach everyone around the globe.

There are still a whole host of FIs that need faster digital ID solutions: Only 55% of US banks offer accounts that can be opened and funded in a day, while almost one-third of global wealth management firms take over four weeks to onboard new clients. Thanks to the deal, Fenergo can “grow fast by aggressively acquiring businesses to complement what they do,” per CEO Marc Murphy.

Branch employees will instead help customers with services including technology assistance, lines of credit, and wealth management. U.S. Bank began rolling out these concepts last fall. The concept branches let U.S. Bank test ways to pair physical banking with the digital-only channels that are displacing it.