Betterment Adds Institutional Platform, Inks Deal With Fidelity

Betterment has launched Betterment Institutional today, a platform to help financial advisors gain access to the same robo-advising tools Betterment uses for its retail wealth management.

Similarly, Betterment announced that it is now working with Fidelity Institutional Wealth Services to extend Betterment Institutional to Fidelity IWS’s 3,000-plus registered independent advisors (RIA’s).

Betterment will essentially be gray-labeling the platform, charging institutions a flat rate of 25 bps for the service. Advisors can add their own fee on top of that. However, clients as well as advisors will have access to the platform and each advisor firm will have three dashboards: 1) a full firm page — complete with total assets under management; 2) total clients, and 3) total accounts — with a dashboard for each advisor and for each client, as well. Advisors can also go into their client’s dashboard and make adjustments. (There are safety precautions to make sure Betterment can tell who is doing what.)

The gray-labeling puts the brokerage firm’s branding at the top of the page, and “powered by Betterment” below. Obviously, branding was a big issue for firms, but Betterment will be the first company to offer branded monthly statements, as well as a branded platform.

“People have been asking us for years and years,” CEO Jon Stein told Bank Innovation. “We said we’d do it over time. We’ve grown so fast that its easy to focus on the retail side, but we wanted to help the other advisors.”

“There was a lot of work building up to this,” Stein added. “ A lot of the team has been engaged in the institutional platform and we’ve been talking and planning the move for years. We reached out to advisor and firms for feedback from advisors and I’m excited because not only is the culmination of a lot of work but its a great product. It’s the first hybrid solution for retail investors, the clients of the advisors, and the advisors themselves.”

Stein added that he doesn’t expect other firms to add a similarly branded platform any time soon because only Betterment has the tech stack and regulatory approval for it.

A beta run of 25 advisory firms is underway, and there are 800 to 1,000 firms that have already signed up and asked for the demo. “This is accessible to anyone,” Stein said. “If you’re an advisor, you can just sign up at www.bettermentinstitutional.com. It takes minutes.”

As for the future of Betterment Institutional, expect it to be very similar to the company’s retail product. Stein hinted at a big update on the retail side in the near future and added that all of the features that are on the retail product will be added to the institutional platform, as well.