According to a research done by Deloitte on the Expansion of Robo-Advisory in Wealth Management, numerous well-known institutes will have between $2.2 trillion and $3.7 trillion in Assets under Management (AuM) from robo-advisory services by 2020. This number is expected to go up to $16.0 trillion by the year 2025. The World Bank Group also estimates that robo-advisors will manage around 10% of all global investment assets by 2020 (Business Insider 2017). Believed to be a low-cost alternative to traditional human advisors, robo-advisors will continue to play a major role in the financial sector due to the ever-growing demand for innovation and efficiency.
What’s more, there are currently over 200 robo-advisors available in the United States and nearly 70 robo-platforms in the European market (Investopedia 2019). Asia is also not too far behind, with countries like China and Singapore growing rapidly through high technological connectivity. In South Korea the growth potential for local robo-advisors increased tenfold due to a recent capital market law revision by the Financial Service Commission (FSC), which allows algorithm-driven robo-advisors to actually manage and operate funds domestically and overseas. You can read the full article here.
So with the market growing ever so competitive, the question that we ask ourselves is, “How are we different?” How is QARA’s Deep Learning Robo-Advisor KOSHO different from the rest of the market? What makes KOSHO stand out from the rest? Most, if not all robo-advisors essentially share the same goal: to provide clients with a simple way to build wealth through investing. So if this is the case, what’s our secret sauce? Why should clients choose KOSHO over other robo-advisors?
“… to provide clients with a simple way to build wealth through investing.”
What is KOSHO?
Before we discuss anything further, let’s first talk about what exactly is KOSHO. KOSHO is QARA’s user-friendly mobile application that was first launched on May 29th, 2018 as beta-service. It was then officially launched on March 21, 2019 as KOSHO 2.0 with new features and upgrades. The app utilizes deep learning technology to forecast the financial markets and provides useful data analytics as well as relevant news information to help individual investors make better investing decisions. KOSHO integrates a gamification feature to help customers better engage with the financial markets and includes a monthly subscription fee to access highly targeted thematic stock portfolios.
KOSHO is available to download for free in the App Store & Google Play Store. Download here.
So How Are We Different?
Key Point 1
KOSHO is unique in several ways. First and foremost, our service provides a unique platform that allows our customers to buy and sell a stock for just under $10 dollars. Let’s say that you want to buy an Apple stock, but you don’t have enough capital to buy the entire $200 dollar stock. With our platform, you can buy $10 dollars off of that $200 dollar stock and receive profit or loss according to that specific ratio. Investors can also choose to invest in stocks through our thematic portfolios that span across 10 different countries worldwide. For example, if you want to include stocks from the “Drone” industry in your portfolio, you can access our top AI recommended stocks for that particular field.
Key Point 2
If our customers want to invest in overseas stocks, they don’t have to pay any transaction or exchange fees. The only fee that they need to account for is the hedging forex fees, which reduces the entire cost to nearly 98%. In traditional sense, if customers want to invest directly in overseas stock, they need to account for 5 separate factors: foreign exchange fee, buying transaction cost, hedging forex fee, selling transaction cost, and again foreign exchange fee. This 5 step payment process makes investing directly in overseas stocks extremely complicated and costly. In most cases, investors go through a brokerage firm and pay a large sum of fee for their services. However, our customers can actually skip those payment processes and focus only on bringing profits to their portfolios.
Key Point 3
Last but not least, KOSHO’s core technology is based on AI deep learning. What this essentially means is that KOSHO is able to take on far more datasets than any other competitors in the market. It utilizes the latest CNN & RNN deep learning algorithms to analyze the past 30 years of market history and takes into account nearly 400 million data, allowing us to better understand historical information and recognize similar market movements in the present time. Some of the datasets included in the algorithm are 20,000+ global stocks, 38 major financial indexes, and 24 cryptocurrencies. Others include the housing price, oil price, gold price, labor market indicators, and currency exchange rates.
Cheers To a Brighter Future
While there are concrete evidence that the market for global robo-advisory services has grown tremendously in recent years, South Korea is still in its nascent stage. Thankfully with the new regulatory sandbox and FSC’s decision to revise its existing law, robo-advisors will now be able to operate funds directly. And through this new initiative, KOSHO can open doors to new markets and provide opportunities for individual investors to trade without the burden of paying unnecessary fees. This has always been QARA’s mission — to democratize the financial services so that anybody can learn to invest in a healthier and more efficient way. With our speciality in AI deep learning, we can finally make that happen through our mobile app KOSHO.
