随着Robo-Adviser收集资产，该模型仍然未经证实

所谓的Robo-Advisers看起来很准备撼动美国金融服务业。数十名最近推出的在线提供商，没有风险投资公司，向投资者提供资产管理和财务计划，该投资者不寻求始终是财富管理标志的个人触感。据纽约的研究公司公司洞察力介绍，本集团管理局的总额包括补充，Futureadvisor和Healthtont，临时临近170亿美元。

Proponents say online-only advisers will carve out a market share like online discount brokerages did in the 1990s. More-bearish observers regard financial advice and management as something that the average investor is much less likely to entrust to a software program than filing taxes or booking a vacation. Recent strategic shifts by online firms appear to support the view that they will have trouble turning a profit without adding real, live humans to the mix.

Robo-advisers分为两种类型:那些法力ge assets on a discretionary mandate and those that provide advice only, often à la carte via financial planning and management software supplemented by educational materials on investing in stock and bond markets. Most of the former deploy passive algorithmic portfolio strategies weighted to the risk profile of an individual investor and useexchange-traded funds.

These new market entrants have proven adept at gathering assets from Internet-savvy Millennials, the generation born between 1981 and 1996. But asinvestorsacquire wealth and take on family responsibilities, they need services that only a flesh-and-blood adviser can provide, contends Mark Ciucci, senior vice president of advice at United Capital Financial Advisers.

“我们不相信investorswill stay with the robo-advisers for the long term, for the simple reason that the closer they get to retirement and realize that another market downturn could derail all of their plans, they will seek advice that goes beyond simple portfolio allocation,” says Ciucci, whose Newport Beach, California–based firm has 47 offices throughout the U.S. and some $10 billion under management.

“我们相信investorswill work with a human adviser who can validate that they are on the right track in their unique circumstance and not based on some blanket concept like the 4 percent rule,” he adds, referring to a rule of thumb for the maximum that retirees should withdraw each year to avoid depleting their savings. Human advisers are valuable because they can look at an investor’s situation holistically, like a doctor choosing from a range of treatment options, Ciucci says.

Helping make his case is FutureAdvisor, a San Francisco–based robo-adviser that has focused on mass-affluent clients since it launched in 2010. At $140,000, the firm’s average account size is much larger than those of its main rivals, albeit with just 1,500 paying clients, versus 150,000 users of its free advisory platform.

FutureadVisor计划以客户的需求变得更加复杂地扩展其个人服务，克里斯·尼科尔森（Chris Nicholson）表示，通信和招聘负责人表示。

但是，现在，尼科尔森为在线顾问看到一个开放的竞争领域，以利用新兴的投资者组。“重要的是要记住的是，波罗顾问服务于数百万群众的富裕家庭，因为他们不是一个有利可图的人口，因为他们不是一个有利可图的人口，”他说。

According to Nicholson, online advisers help their full-service counterparts by broadening the base of investing households and teaching future affluent families to expect and rely on financial advice. Although he thinks services like FutureAdvisor will eventually account for a big chunk of passively invested portfolios, he predicts that traditional advisers will maintain an advantage when it comes to providing more-complex and customized services.

在线新鲜的北欧可能会将怀疑论者视为Luddites，但他们的长期前景仍然是多云的。Robo-Advisers从消费者技术惯例而不是金融服务规范中获得他们的业务策略。它们提供免费或超级成本服务，使投资者纳入船上，然后在账户余额增长时，高级产品上的客户端。

因此，大多数这些公司都依赖于企业支持，因此它们与任何其他大众市场启动相同的挑战：在他们的资本出现之前打击可持续盈利能力。行业内部人士表示，基于管理层下的收入和管理下的规定的费用和资产外，联合宣布的风险投资，没有宣布的风险投资注销，尚未接近转向利润。

Recent changes at two of the biggest robo-advisers suggest that such outfits are rethinking their business models. Rather than compete with humans, New York–based Betterment is offering a new service for independent financial advisers that will launch in beta in September. The four-year-old firm, which counts venture capital patrons Anthemis Group, Citi Ventures and Menlo Ventures among its investors as well as traditional wealth managers Bessemer Trust Co. and Northwestern Mutual Capital, has more than 41,000 direct clients.

改良的ability to combine the low-cost online experience with human guidance is a win-win, co-founder and COO Eli Broverman says. “We see a great opportunity to work with advisers and empower them to have a best-in-class investing product driven by technology so they can spend their time focusing on other challenging areas like estate planning.”

但是，如果有权为顾问的初始发行可以将自己的初始发行源于现有的客户关系管理和报告供应商或监禁经纪人经销商提供的平台，则目前还没有清楚。“它最终将归结为价格点，”湖太浩湖财富管理首席执行官Richard dee说。“规划软件，基于云的报告资源和定量投资组合重新平衡模型已经非常容易获得和实惠。”

Dee thinks the most compelling offering for wealth managers considering a provider that combines planning, asset management and CRM services would be a low-cost product they could use for smaller accounts. He half-jokingly calls his firm a cyborg adviser; launched in 2012 and headquartered in Zephyr Cove, Nevada, it combines online access to advisers and portfolio information with high-touch personal service.

Wealthfront — the largest online adviser, with some 13,000 clients and an average account size of $90,000 — is setting its sights on the institutional marketplace instead of expanding into the more service-intensive segments of the individual-investor market like its competitors. Launched late last year, the firm manages $1.3 billion in assets.

Healyfront对501（c）投资者的客户服务相同的方法 - 非营利实体等捐赠和养老金- 至于个人客户。帕洛阿尔托，加利福尼亚州的公司，此后的资产上一百万美元和25个基点的费用没有费用。首席执行官Adam Nash描述了这一举动作为互补提供而不是战略转变：“这是我们使命的一部分，每个人都应该得到复杂的财务建议。”

Nash insists that Wealthfront remains focused on the Millennial market, which he estimates to account for 90 million people in the U.S., with a combined net worth of more than $2 trillion that could rise to $7 trillion by 2018. So far, the firm has raised some $65.5 million from the likes of Greylock Partners, Index Ventures, Ribbit Capital and Social+Capital Partnership, as well as angel investors, includingMarc Andreessen和Ben Horowitz of Andreessen Horowitz and Yahoo president and CEOMarissa Mayer..

“Our company will grow its services with Millennials, similar to what Charles Schwab did for the baby boomers,” Nash asserts. Schwab, which germinated from an investment newsletter business in the early 1970s, revolutionized the discount brokerage industry, becoming a giant in just two decades. Whether robo-advisers’ venture patrons can wait that long for success is an open question.