Betterment and Wealthfront, two of the most popular standalone automated advice platforms for individual investors, suffered brief interruptions to business Monday during the market rout, as high traffic volume overwhelmed servers. But they weren’t alone. TD Ameritrade reportedly had slower trading times and difficulty with its mobile app; T. Rowe Price suffered a brief interruption in online access; and Vanguard reported sporadic difficulties with logging in and delays in trading. Schwab reportedly had delays in a “trading application,” but those clients were redirected to Schwab.com, which was working. “The glitches on Monday could also hurt the robo advisors’ reputations with customers who have become more comfortable being DIY investors. After all, investors don’t want to be blocked from their accounts on days when the stock market is flying high or—in the case of the past week—plummeting,” writes Investopedia.com.
Riskalyze Retirement Solution Launches
Riskalyze announced today at the T3 Advisor Conference, in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., that Riskalyze Retirement Solutions, the industry’s first end-to-end digital 401(k) experience built around the Risk Number, is live and available for advisor onboarding. First introduced at the firm’s Fearless Investing Summit last year, this joint offering with Vestwell is a digital platform designed to make it easy and profitable for advisors to propose, onboard and serve 401(k) plans. “Through our joint platform, Riskalyze advisors will be able to create and manage retirement accounts quickly and painlessly, while meeting all compliance needs,” said Aaron Schumm, CEO at Vestwell. “We’re excited that advisors can begin using this offering from Riskalyze to provide clients with a comprehensive, risk-oriented 401(k) solution.”
Advisor Group Partners with The W Source
Advisor Group said Wednesday it has partnered with The W Source, a nationwide professional networking organization for woman. The country’s largest network of independent advisory firms said the goal of the partnership is to drive “awareness and support for the advancement of female advisors across the financial services industry.” The W Source establishes networking groups of 20 to 25 professionals in local areas and offers them proprietary tools and resources, marketing support and dedicated sales coaches that assist them in running their local chapters. Financial advisors, CPAs, attorneys and risk managers are among the professionals that come together to create the existing 12 chapters. The organization hopes to expand to 150 markets in the country before 2019.
