What is Keeping Financial Advisors Up at Night? A 2018 Outlook

Last month, I recapped our growth in 2017, which we followed with a press release detailing what topics and trends our readers were interested in throughout the year. In the release, we noted that financial advisors are the fastest growing audience on Harvest. This group now accounts for nearly 70,000 monthly active users, over 300% more than a year prior. According to our data, two trending topics that stood out to advisors on our platform were “robo” platforms and practice management. To me, this suggests that advisors have been reconciling not only with how best to manage client portfolios, but also simultaneously trying to justify their existence. One month into the new year, here is how I see these trends playing out for the remainder of 2018: Robo-Advisors Robo-advisors are projected to manage $385 billion of client assets by 2021, according to Cerulli Associates. Betterment, Personal Capital, and Wealthfront were the pioneers …