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Hmmmmm, many questions! Also, I like the alliteration of your company name. Sorry, I'm confused about one point: Is the Software simply acting as a conduit be

Hmmmmm, many questions! Also, I like the alliteration of your company name. Sorry, I'm confused about one point: Is the Software simply acting as a conduit between the client (employee of Company X) and another human (the financial planner), or would the software actually be generating advice? In the latter case, would that advice be relayed to the client via the human financial planner, or would it be delivered directly to the client? In the latter case (where software delivers advice directly to a client), how do you plan on convincing the SEC that the software (and, indeed, your company) is a qualified investment adviser? I'm also curious, how much "client activity" is being assumed for each client? What I mean is, you might have clients (again, individual employees of Company X) coming back for financial planning again and again over a (relatively) short time, either because they are having lots of life events happening, or because they're unsure, or because they want to explore different paths, or whatever. Have you thought of a way to prevent clients like that from making the service too expensive to run?

wj 11y ago
The software would be generating a financial plan for the user (clients different from users in this case) but it is not generating specific investment advice--we'll leave that up to the RIA. You might compare our algorithms to some of the various calculators that you can find on any finance site (http://finance.yahoo.com/calculator/retirement/ret02/ http://finance.yahoo.com/calculator/retirement/ret02/) or some newspaper sites (http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/upshot/buy-rent-calculator.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/upshot/buy-rent-calc...) but more advanced as they feed off each other. I'm not sure that our software will ever deliver advice along the lines of "Buy mutual fund X" and certainly would not even be able to do so before recordkeeper tie-in. An example of what it does now regarding investments is something along the lines of you and your wife have X dollars in retirement savings across three retirement accounts. You're making A, B, C in monthly contributions to each. Assuming age-based returns (your portfolio gets more conservative the closer you get to retirement) or account-based returns you will have Y dollars in monthly income in retirement which is Z short of your retirement income goal. (Often getting somebody to contribute enough is a larger challenge than asset allocation.) Also, financial planners are not SEC registered. I hope users come back over and over again! I'm hoping the budgeting tool, emails, and value we provide keeps them coming back. You realize the connection between life events and taking an interest in their financial plans and that indeed is when a lot of users will return to us. Since everything is automated the only cost for heavy users would be server and bandwidth. And I truly do want to help people be financially ready for those life events so we will gladly accept those costs. Thank you for the questions Karl!

wj 11y ago

The software would be generating a financial plan for the user (clients different from users in this case) but it is not generating specific investment advice--we'll leave that up to the RIA. You might compare our algorithms to some of the various calculators that you can find on any finance site (http://finance.yahoo.com/calculator/retirement/ret02/ http://finance.yahoo.com/calculator/retirement/ret02/) or some newspaper sites (http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/upshot/buy-rent-calculator.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/upshot/buy-rent-calc...) but more advanced as they feed off each other. I'm not sure that our software will ever deliver advice along the lines of "Buy mutual fund X" and certainly would not even be able to do so before recordkeeper tie-in. An example of what it does now regarding investments is something along the lines of you and your wife have X dollars in retirement savings across three retirement accounts. You're making A, B, C in monthly contributions to each. Assuming age-based returns (your portfolio gets more conservative the closer you get to retirement) or account-based returns you will have Y dollars in monthly income in retirement which is Z short of your retirement income goal. (Often getting somebody to contribute enough is a larger challenge than asset allocation.) Also, financial planners are not SEC registered. I hope users come back over and over again! I'm hoping the budgeting tool, emails, and value we provide keeps them coming back. You realize the connection between life events and taking an interest in their financial plans and that indeed is when a lot of users will return to us. Since everything is automated the only cost for heavy users would be server and bandwidth. And I truly do want to help people be financially ready for those life events so we will gladly accept those costs. Thank you for the questions Karl!