Robo advisors are fine tools for people who understand basic investing concepts and know how to use them. But what about the newbie who needs more hand-holding?
The core banking software provider Fiserv and the fintech startup GoldBean have partnered to provide a digital advisor meant to provide that extra assistance.
GoldBean has an “investing for beginners” platform that was designed to promote financial literacy. By analyzing people’s spending, it creates customized portfolios featuring companies and brands with which end users are already familiar. GoldBean is a graduate of the INV Fintech Accelerator run by Fiserv and Bank Innovation.
“We can take the digital experience from a robo perspective and add a lot of educational components to that,” said Cheryl Nash, president of investment services at Fiserv. “Educational capabilities are so needed now, with baby boomers getting for retirement and millennials just getting into investing.”
Part of the goal here is to help ease the process of wealth management client onboarding.
“If you can make the onboarding, especially for beginner investors, as light touch as possible, you can take them through a different path than what a traditional wealth management client would go though,” said Jane Barratt, GoldBean's CEO.
Some people don’t know what investing terms such as balanced portfolio mean, Barratt said.
“If you grew up in a financially healthy household you know, but if words like portfolio and risk and balance are unfamiliar to you, they can take you off course,” she said. “Having that onboarding perspective that’s education first and advice along the way and then leading to more advisory engagement is the way we’ve built our business and where we think there’s a huge opportunity.”
GoldBean provides a library of educational articles about investing, a two-week investing boot camp that pushes materials out to customers, and personalized learning tracks that tailor the content to the user’s life stage.
Fiserv hopes that by integrating GoldBean education and advice into its Unified Wealth Platform, some of these investors will eventually interact with the human wealth managers who use Fiserv’s platform, for instance when they need to talk about a life change.
Nash said she believes this type of hybrid model, where digital advice and human expertise coexist, is where the industry is going versus stand-alone platforms.
