Les robo-advisors: menace ou opportunité pour l'Europe?

Abstract

Nowadays, technology is increasingly being used in our everyday life and therefore, it appears we stand on the brink of the fourth industrial revolution. One of the economic sector that is the most affected by this technological advance is none other than that of finance. Indeed, financial technology, also known as fintech, has really taken off since the year 2012 and continues its expansion by always proposing new services. “Robo-advisors” are part of these new services and are considered to be the latest manifestation of the long technological development that has transformed the banking sector over the last twenty years. Recognized as the pioneers of this technology, U.S. companies such as Betterment, Wealthfront or Personal Capital possess the majority of the assets under management. Nevertheless, given the success achieved in the United States, new robo-advisors arrive in Europe with the dream of duplicating the success of their U.S. counterparts and thus conquer this new market with their automated wealth management services. Besides having a lower pricing structure, these latter present several advantages: they are faster to calculate and make fewer errors than humans, they provide unbiased advice not influenced by external emotions and they are transparent. Therefore, seeing those advantages, the following questions arise: will these robo-advisors pose a threat to the traditional financial institutions which may lose clients? Or should these traditional financial institutions see the emergence of robo-advisors as an opportunity to integrate this new technology into their business? In order to answer these questions, this study indicates which strategies a robo-advisor should follow if it wants to win the investors’ confidence and how traditional financial institutions react to the arrival of these new potential competitors.