Brooke Southall

Perhaps Mark Casady can cross the chasm between conventional brokerage and advisory services. Prudent process (asset/liability study, investment policy, portfolio construction, performance monitor) authenticated back to non-negotiable statutory fiduciary duty (which put financial services back into the financial services business) has largely been ignored by the brokerage industry. Yet it is essential for professional standing and creating a safe environment in which brokers can work in rendering advice. Professional standing in rendering advice is based on statutory duty, not addressing disparate client objectives like education funding or retirement, etc. .Mark can cut through  a lot of myths and cultural impediments that impede innovation in ways others cannot. SCW

Mark Casady quietly became co-founder of venture capital firm and, pre-post-LPL, it's making noise

Voya

Vestigo Ventures

Ian Sheridan

Dave Blundin

Mark Hoffman

LifeYield

Mark Casady

Maliz Beams

Stripped down to its essentials, financial advice is a fairly straightforward proposition. Done well, a highly ethical individual stewards the assets and actions of an investor in a personal and professional interchange.
 
But now a vibrant new class of entrepreneurs is staking their fates and their fortunes on the premise that financial advice can be delivered in a better, cheaper, easier, more ethical, more transparent manner and, as a bonus, in a way more devoid of human annoyance on both ends of the transaction.
 
Cue the robo-advisors, arguably a callous misnomer for automated asset management. 
 
The prototypical robo-advisory entrepreneur has more brands on his or her resume than NASCAR. The bona fides of these industry upstarts often include Ivy-level colleges and MBA programs at Harvard or Stanford. They are often flush with IPO dollars realized at concerns like LinkedIn, Facebook, eBay, Amazon  and Microsoft. 
 
Robo-folk believe that technology is not an enabler of advice but rather, if engineered correctly, advice itself in digital form. 
 
And, they believe the best solutions originate in Silicon Valley or academia, not Wall Street. Robo-entrepreneurs are white-boarding the whole business model, culture and technology from scratch in the conviction that little can be learned from a legacy advice system still rooted in an investment banking culture acting under the core premise that if stockbrokers get rich some of the good effects will trickle down to clients – with the clients none the wiser. 
 
Robo-advisors are a scintillating topic for students of the advice game as they grow by hundreds of millions in assets every month, constantly evolve their business models and receive cash infusions from ever-larger swaths of venture capitals.
 
Throw in the fact that robo-advisors have yet to see a dime in profits -- and won’t in the foreseeable future -- and you have real intrigue. 
 
RIABiz has avidly covered the fast-evolving robo-advice phenomenon and will continue to do so. We present the growing body of articles here.

Robo-Advisors

The departing LPL chief is one of two general partners of Vestigo Ventures, which bought a stake in LifeYield -- an advisor software company

Mark Casady quietly became co-founder of venture capital firm and, pre-post-LPL, it's making noise

Stephen Winks

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