Automated investment service, Wealthfront, announced this week that it now has $1 billion in assets under management. This is fast-paced growth, considering it had $100 million under management in early 2013, $500 million by December of 2013, and $800 million in March of this year.
This growth confirms the trend we’ve been seeing in the explosion of automated wealth management fintech services, the oft-called robo-advisors.
U.S.-based companies such as Betterment, LearnVest, Personal Capital, SigFig and European companies Nutmeg, Money on Toast, and rplan are all vying for consumers’ portfolios, trying to compete with superior algorithms.
Palo Alto-based Wealthfront differentiates itself by offering a Single-Stock Diversification service. This service enables users with a large portion of their net worth tied up in a single stock to transfer their holdings to Wealthfront, which will slowly sell off the stocks commission free, and with a tax-aware approach. While the service is currently available only for Twitter employees, ex-employees, and its investors, Wealthfront plans to open it up for more companies in the future.
Wealthfront demonstrated at FinovateStartup 2009, when it went by the name KaChing.