Robo-advisor dream of disrupting Wall Street wealth is not working out exactly as planned

• Over the past decade a niche of fintech wealth management firms including Wealthfront, Personal Capital and Betterment tackled one of the biggest disruptive challenges: financial services.
• Wealthfront’s $1.4 billion sale to UBS this week, which was preceded by Personal Capital’s $1 billion sale to Empower Financial in 2020, leaves Betterment among stand-alone robo-advisors.
• The exits show that building economies of scale and marketing might in wealth management are difficult to do in a business with low margins and high costs of customer acquisition already dominated by investment giants like Vanguard and Schwab and Wall Street banks.

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