Introducing wealthbot.io

I am pretty excited about this one…

After a few years of brainstorming, developing, testing, breaking and fixing by a team of a few brilliant people, I have the privilege to open source a very cool project.

wealthbot.io — (we affectionately call him Webo) is the world’s first open source wealth management platform (it could be a robo-advisor, a large SaaS RIA platform, but even more importantly it could also function as a powerful and free technology for individuals).

Wealthbot.io solves a problem for Registered Investment Advisers (RIAs). He allows them to simply and profitably serve the average investor, who might only have a few thousand dollars to invest.

Managing money is not an easy job and that is why wealthy individuals usually take their hard-earned millions and seek the advice of RIAs. An investment advisor has a fiduciary duty to provide suitable investment advice and act in her clients’ best interests. Professionals at growing and protecting investments, RIA services include financial and retirement planning, risk adjusted portfolio selection, portfolio rebalancing and tax loss harvesting among others.

But what if you apply the same services to a $50,000 investment? Why not make that money grow just as well as a multi-million dollar portfolio?

It would be awesome, but as mentioned, this is no easy job… unless you are a robot, of course. In recent years, many of the basic portfolio management strategies executed by RIAs have been automated and encapsulated into the world of robo-advisors. Companies like Wealthfront, Betterment, Acorns, Personal Capital and a few others have already made a dramatic impact on the fintech industry.

While robots are cool and can do many amazing things like rebalance a bunch of portfolios with their eyes closed or perform out of balance calculations like it’s a nightly job or something; we, humans, still like to have a little person-to-person interaction in our lives (communicating with robots is still not very pleasant… “press # to repeat this menu then 9, then 3, then 17 minus your birthday and…”).

Wealthbot.io automates a lot of the RIA’s non-value add tasks so she can focus on her client relationships and her client’s goals. Webo will ensure documents are flowing electronically, he will happily apply tax loss harvesting and rebalance portfolios on household and account levels, he will even talk to your favorite financial custodian and reconcile all transactions using a sophisticated portfolio accounting system.

Overall, wealthbot.io is a platform which is aimed at managing and making money.

Since it’s open source, anyone in the community can profit, either by developing plugins or extensions of existing functionality, helping non tech-savvy users setup the platform for their in-house needs or launch a robo-advisor or a RIA firm of your own! The beauty of open software is that anyone can take it in the direction of their wildest dreams. Our ideas and roadmap are open to the world as well.

And, I have to brag a little. We’ve spent countless hours developing a system that has an extremely solid technical foundation.

I hope you join the project on github, sign up for our mailing list at wealthbot.io, check out the demo and of course don’t forget to follow us @wealthbot.

As always, feel free to drop me an email or leave your comments.

Cheers.