Will Robo advisors take control of the ETF market?

Betterment and Wealthfront are 11 and 8 years old. They set the tone in the market for Robo-Advisors, that are neither Robots nor Advisors as Paolo Sironi kept saying more than 4 yrs ago. They got leapfrogged by the incumbents which as of today manage 10 times more assets through their various digital wealth offerings.

Autonomous Next Research [1] shows a ratio of $550 over $50, Incumbents over Fintech Standalones as of the end of 2018.

The tug-a-war between no-human advice (which was the original purists' approach), hybrid (some human advice and or someone to call); has tilted towards the hybrid advisory model.

The tug-a-war of flat fees versus % of AUM; remains tilted towards the % of AUM which was the conventional one. Flat fee advisory have been offered by XY planning network and directly to the consumer only recently by Charles Schwab (see No Trade-offs: Give customers everything they want as cheaply as possible).

Back in 2016, just after Vanguard stepped into the market with their Personal Advisor services, most well-known institutions [2] were predicting between $ 2.2 trillion and $ 3.7 trillion in assets to…