Robo-advisory was a dead business 5+ years ago. The game quickly had to expand to add services on top of the core robo offering. Now the big guys like Vanguard, Fidelity, Schwab all have their own robo-flavors. Its become table stakes. In that context, this deal makes sense.

UBS has a $2.6tr+ wealth management division - they need the sexy fintech frontend.

$27B and $8B AUM are both peanuts, and I imagine not a big factor in determining valuation for these robo-advisors. Corporations are likely more interested in the number of users, demographic breakdown (mostly well-off millennials), their financial data, credit profiles and upsell opportunities.

This. The amount of money they manage is a mouse fart in a hurricane when it comes to such low fee business as robo advisory. That a robo advisor can get $5bln valuation on having $8 bln of assets speaks either to the silliness of the valuation or that the value is not in the assets managed (likely a combination of both factors).

It probably depends on what adjacent financial products they are selling and how good of a job they are doing at selling those to existing customers. Wealthfront is always suggesting different financial products, cards, etc. There is little money in managing your money since these are mostly served by large funds like Vanguard, but there is a lot of money in referrals selling you other products. It's possible Wealthsimple is doing much better?

For what it's worth, Wealthsimple exited the US market last year and transferred all their US customers to Betterment. They seem to still be adding new products in Canada though (like a Venmo-like cash transfer system.)

Well it's not robo-advisor anymore. It's also crypto, stock trading (copying Robinhood) and tax preparation.

And WealthSimple has a Venmo like Cash app (called Cash). They do way more than stocks.

do people even use Cash though? all my buddies just use interac

They *just* launched, and they've been pushing a lot in University towns. I don't know how successful it'll be, but every single one of my friends has WS Cash, and if I ever had to send them cash I'd first ask if they'd use Cash since it's so much simpler than Interac.

Unfortunately, most people say no right now since the WS Cash Card is really weak (so no point in using it) and it takes a couple of days for you to withdraw money from WS Cash to your bank account.

There is no way this catches up to e-transfer in popularity. Everyone in Canada knows about venmo and cashapp and the various other scam versions of e-transfers that people are forced to use in America and they laugh at them for it.

E-transfers are literally the best part about Canadian banking.

They don't need to catch up to e-Transfers to be successful. I'm not sure what their numbers but if they manage to be the app of choice for university students and young adults alone, it would be a massive win for them. I know people who have started to pay their rent using WS Cash, and I'm sure when they graduate they'd like to continue doing so. There's also the Cash Card directly tied to this account, which they get transaction fees from, as well as associated WS Trade/Invest.

I'm not trying to be a shill, I personally wouldn't invest in WS since I think they're incredibly overvalued. But E-Transfer is very dated and has a lot of problems, and there is potential for a competitor to come up and replace it.

Wealthsimple now has in house advisors who email and call you to discuss your account. There is nothing 'robo' about the business model anymore and instead they are just focused on growing AUM by talking to people and convincing them to move more of their savings/TFSA/RRSP over to them.

Speaking of TFSA/RRSPs etc. is there a canadian version of bogleheads we should know about?

We have quite a bit in line with this:

https://www.canadianportfoliomanagerblog.com/blog/

https://community.rationalreminder.ca/

https://www.finiki.org/wiki/Main_Page

https://www.financialwisdomforum.org/forum/index.php

https://canadiancouchpotato.com/

Also, we have Ben Felix's podcasts - Rational Reminder

https://canadiancouchpotato.com/ is my go to! They put out amazing content over the years and have a great set of model portfolios for those just getting into investing.

Canadian Couch Potato is the closest.

All about the revenue they make off of that AUM and a multiple of that revenue for the purchase price