Robo-advisors today: R2D2 or Frankenstein's monster?

NASHVILLE — In the retirement planning industry, words matter as much as numbers. Take the phrase “robo-advisor.”

It conjures images of that cute can on wheels, R2D2, who rescues Skywalker and Solo et al time and again. Calling robo-advisors what they really are, algorithms that can make investing decisions, is not quite as sexy, as advisors attending technology sessions at this year’s NAPA 401(k) Summit might realize.

But according to Juniper Research, revenue from robo-advisor technology will reach $25 billion by 2022. Compare this to around $1.7 billion in 2017 revenue, and suddenly the word that comes to mind might be “serious” rather than “cute.”

Fiserv’s “2017 Expectations & Experiences: Borrowing and Wealth Management,” says “four of the top five loan payment methods are now electronic, and 21 percent of millennial investors use a robo-advisor service to make investments.”

Still, for every hyped up blog post that casts robo-advisors as human-helping R2D2s, there are worried  articles portraying them as job-killing Frankenstein’s monsters.

In the employer-sponsored retirement space, a little less worry accompanies the hype. After all, plan participants are less likely to want to consult a robo-advisor service, according to a 2017 report from the Employee Benefits Research Institute.

Humans are still preferred here. In fact, more than half of participants EBRI surveyed say they’re very likely or somewhat likely to consult their plan provider for advice or an employer-provided financial advisor. But, EBRI says, only a quarter of participants say they would be likely to obtain advice from “an independent advice provider that provides advice solely online.”

So are robo-advisors useful digital financial advice givers? Technology-driven asset managers? Or job-killing, industry-disrupting intruders?

The technology isn’t exactly killing entire jobs; some solutions, however, do take on more of the tasks of the human’s job than others.

Deloitte groups robo-advisors in four evolutionary stages in its report, “The Expansion of Robo-Advisory in Wealth Management.” Defining a robo-advisor as “an online portfolio management solution that aims to invest client assets by automating client advisory,” Deloitte compared robo-advisors currently in the market and identified an evolutionary timeline:

Robo-advisor 1.0: Clients answer a questionnaire and product proposals pop out based on their answers. The client is responsible for buying and managing the portfolio.

Robo-advisor 2.0: Clients answer a questionnaire that determines their products and portfolio allocations. A human investment manager handles the actual investing and fund moving. Deloitte calls this resulting stage “semi-automatic,” because humans still have some oversight of the algorithms.

Robo-advisor 3.0: Algorithms make most of the decisions, but human fund managers oversee the investment actions.

Robo-advisor 4.0: The human investment manager is out of the picture and the algorithms not only make decisions, but keep learning as they take into consideration the individual investor’s needs, as well as the market’s situation.

What Deloitte (and probably many in technology) see as “evolution” might also be thought of as a spectrum, a high-touch to low-touch scale of human-technology interaction. And actually, some total-robo-advisor companies have turned around from their original vision and hired human advisors in the past few years.

Since we’re talking evolution, would those robo-advisor/human combos be called mutations? Deloitte uses a different word — it calls that type of model “hybrids.”

Words matter.