What Influences May Robo-Advisors Have on the Service of Professional Financial Consultants and the Financial Industry?

Master’s Thesis from the year 2017 in the subject Business economics - Company formation, Business Plans, grade: 2,0, Liverpool John Moores University, language: English, abstract: This research project is going to examine and evaluate a new phenomenon of the financial advisory services market, the so called Robo-Advisors (RA). They represent the next stage of the evolution in the financial advisory and wealth management industry. RA are a new type of financial adviser or portfolio manager, which work solely online and with minimal human intervention and they stepped right into competition with human wealth managers. In a generation that grew up with the internet, computers and mobile devices, RA have the potential to start their triumph procession making many jobs of professional human financial consultants obsolete. The main objective of this research project is to sketch an overview of possibilities and disadvantages of Robo-Advisors in the future and give an outline to the academic research that will be needed in the future. This thesis is one of the first academic papers in English language, examining RA and their possible impact on the industry. As a field study, it delivers a broad overview of a large amount of topics describing the various characteristics of a fully automatic asset management system, and the competitive situation with human consultants or asset managers.