The Financial Robos Are Here!

Well, they are here.

Last night I was reading an article about a marketing guy saying he had an uncomfortable conversation with his financial planner: he was going to give his business to a robo planner. Some statistics were quoted in the article that the robo planners were costing between .20& to .80% of the asset value whereas a real human was around 1%. Nice chunk of savings there.

There were some discussions about how a robo was not going to advise you during a market crash or guide you through a financial crisis. A robo was not going to call you and talk you through your financial planning.

But if you are a young millennial who never had such service, you probably won’t care. You might get used to doing it yourself. I happen to hope that people would prefer a human touch but what if people really don’t care? Some people with the real money, and in the automated future it may be just people with real money that exists, sometimes don’t care about the human aspect. They just care about the money. What else is the shareholder primacy about?

So, what is the answer? I still don’t know.

I’ve been reading books about what to do in an automated future. These books generally talk about “being human”. But… what does it mean to be human?