I see many plans from businesses every week, trying to help investors and advisors get to great outcomes. In respect to an approach to support financial advice, some are more plausible than others.

Let’s start with Robos. You may know we have a unique partnership with Cogo Labs to study companies’ SEO and SEM practices. We learn a lot from it; it provides amazing insight. I love the “wow!” factors.

First Wow — Robos handling financial advice for retail clients are rather ineffective in how they spend customer acquisition money. Based on spending for customer assets, the technology never approaches a good return on investment.  

Second Wow — Only one startup firm we know of — WealthSimple in Canada —  appears to be achieving a good return of spend on customer acquisition. Many lessons can be learned from what the company’s doing.

Beyond Robo, we see many potentially wow-worthy software ideas for advisors.

First Wow — Smart design that simplifies ease of use for advisors and staff. With its “setup once” approach, using API’s to feed account data is a good example.

Second Wow — Simple but powerful evidence of the value of the advisor. For a retail investor, a report or graph or other smart, clean design goes a long way to clarifying what the advisor is doing and how financial plans are coming together.

When reviewing startups’ business plans, our team relies on Cogo Labs resources to illustrate smart spending. We also rely on good technology stack design to give time-starved advisors an efficiency boost.  

My CMO experience at large companies has taught me a lot about startup best practices. Bring on the WOW!

Ian Sheridan
Co-founder
Managing Director