FutureAdvisor, a site offering automated long-term financial and investment advice for free, launched on Tuesday with support from top executives at Square and Yelp.
FutureAdvisor, a site offering automated long-term financial and investment advice for free, launched on Tuesday with support from top executives at Square and Yelp.
In a sense, FutureAdvisor is like a version of Mint for financial advice; it asks for read-only access to a user's bank accounts, IRA, and other investment accounts, even using the same third-party authentication scheme that Mint uses, according to Bo Lu, the co-founder of the company.
So far, FutureAdvisor is just a free Web app, with no mobile app on the horizon, Lu said, although it works "great" on the iPad browser. "We believe that users are going to want to manage their 401K sitting down, rather than on the bus," Lu said.
When a user signs up, he or she is asked some basic questions about their financial goals, such as their age, as well as their risk profile and time that they would like to retire. Users then have the option of linking to their IRA accounts, or manually entering the stocks and funds they've invested in. FutureAdvisor then creates a personalized recommendation.
"We are absolutely on the side of the consumer," Lu said. "We have a free analysis, that is accessible to everyone, and we don't take money from money managers."
FutureAdvisor does make money from two tiers of paid subscriptions: a $49 "gold" tier, and a $195 "platinum" tier, both of which provide the customer with different levels of personalized advice via video calls and portfolio monitoring. FutureAdvisor's free, basic service is based on "algorithms with human oversight," Lu said.
The personalized recommendations don't include specific stock recommendations. Instead, the emphasis is on mutual funds, especially index funds with low annual fees. FutureAdvisor may recommend a user diversify into an international fund or invest overseas, or give advice on how or when to open a Roth IRA fund. The company employs four economists on staff, Lu said, who endorse a large body of research that shows that index funds consistently perform better than personally managed funds, about 80 percent of the time. Instead, the company's software is founded upon sound financial practices that have been traditionally used for the service of wealthy clients, Lu said.
"We're just taking that financial advice and providing it to everyone else through the magic of software," Lu said.
The site will send emails to clients on a monthly basis, to help them reassess how their investments are performing, and how they are meeting their own goals.
"We're very much a strategic investment shop, and we very much look toward the long term," Lu said.
From a security standpoint, the site uses 256-bit encryption, but never actually stores a username or password on the site. Instead, that information is passed to a trusted third party, which then returns to FutureAdvisor the security token that allows the site to examine, but not modify, the user's investment information. If a user changes his password at his or her investment site, he or she will need to change it on FutureAdvisor as well.
The site is backed by Sequoia Capital and angel investors that include Keith Rabois, the chief operating officer at Square, and Yelp founder Jeremy Stoppelman.
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