Disruptive Voice podcast, episode 2: BSSE research paper series. Betterment - Krishna Kantheti, George Rudolph (MBA 2016)

the Forum at HBS
The Disruptive Voice
1 min readFeb 2, 2016

In this new podcast series, Forum Director and BSSE Professor Derek van Bever talks to students about their final paper for the elective course Building and Sustaining a Successful Enterprise.

According to a recent study by consulting firm A.T. Kearney, robo advisors will manage over $2 trillion in the U.S. by 2020. Assets under managment (AUM) are expected to increase 68% annually.

For their final paper (downloadable here), Krishna Kantheti and George Rudolph (both MBA 2016) drew on their experiences from working in the financial services industry along with the theories taught in the BSSE course to explain why, as a complete newcomer to the financial services industry, robo advisory company Betterment was able to experience such exceptional growth so quickly ($3B+ AUM in 5 years), how its offering is differentiated from other seemingly similar products by better-known providers, and examine where it should look next.

Are there other fintech companies that you’d like to hear about? What other theories would you call upon to suggest a path forward for Betterment?

Tracy Kim Horn, Community Manager, Forum for Growth & Innovation

Derek van Bever, Professor and Director of the Forum for Growth and Innovation; Alyson Wurtzbacher, Program Assistant; George Randolph (MBA 2016); Krishna Kantheti (MBA 2016)

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the Forum at HBS
The Disruptive Voice

Forum for Growth and Innovation — a research project at the Harvard Business School guided by Professor Clay Christensen