Robo-advisory: Opportunities and risks for the future of financial advisory

Abstract

Without professional advisors, taking financial risks is a challenging task for most private households (retail investors). Across countries, digital financial advisory services, in particularly robo-advisors, are becoming more popular in retail and private banking. These tools support their users in financial decision-making, like risk-measurement, portfolio selection, or rebalancing. Recent studies suggest that in the long-term, they could supplement human financial advisory. This work illustrates the key concepts of this (r)evolution, and discusses strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and risks of robo-advisory. The results suggest that robo-advisors have a huge potential to shape the future of the financial advisory industry, despite the fact that there is still a lot of potential yet to be exploited.