Will Your Robo Adviser Plan Your Estate?

Illustration: Sydney Morning Herald

Fintech has brought us robo portfolios, robo rebalancing, robo tax-loss harvesting. What's next?

According to Steve Lockshin of Adviceperiod in this Barron's interview, human estate planners should start feeling nervous:

We are beginning to work on automation for estate planning—the one area that advisors love to insist cannot be automated. We are using our access to data to build out the algorithms to automate estate-planning recommendations and then create the appropriate legal documents. It’s all rules-based, and when it comes to most lawyers, it’s an antiquated industry.

Should Retirement Savers Slow Down?

Most Americans aren't building adequate retirement nest eggs. Investment providers usually urge them to save more. So how do you explain this T. Rowe Price mailing?

Why on earth would a mutual fund firm want enthusiastic retirement savers to slow down – to trot rather than gallop as they add to their investments?

Turns out it doesn't. "Rein in" is seldom taken literally in an age when few of us ride or drive a horse to work. The phrase has become a figure of speech. If you're a nervous wreck, you're urged to rein in your emotions. If you're deep in debt, you're advised to rein in your credit card usage.

As figures of speech age, their meaning sometimes goes astray. What T. Rowe Price really wants, according to the next page of the mailer, is for retirement investors to consolidate their accounts.

Maybe their headline should have been E Pluribus Unum.

Our advice to retirement savers? Give yourself free rein.

Imagine a Thundering Herd of Fiduciaries

When Blair duQuesnay, an investment adviser, wrote a NY Times op-ed in praise of female investment advisers, the headline read: Consider Firing Your Male Broker. Some readers accused her of fudging the distinction between registered representatives of brokerage firms, who traditionally work on commission, and registered investment advisers, who as fiduciaries are pledged to put their clients' interests above their own.

But these days the dividing line between brokers and RIAs is not so clear. Some wear both hats, and more and more "brokers" now work for fees, not commissions. In reality, duQuesnay asserts, "the investing public uses the words broker/advisor/adviser interchangeably. They do not know the difference…."

Maybe the public is on to something. David DeVoe, a San Francisco investment banker, notes the rising competition that wirehouses like Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley face from large RIA organizations and offers a provocative thought:

What if one of the wirehouses decided to become a full-blown RIA, to embrace fiduciary and independence? I think that could be a fascinating development.

The wirehouses have done a pretty good job over the years of mimicking the independent model in many regards, but they’ve done it slowly. I’ve said this before: It takes a long time to turn a battleship, but once it does turn, you have a lot of artillery pointed at you.

If it happens, will females be well represented in the crew?