Following up on its partnership with robo-advisor Betterment Institutional, Fidelity Institutional Wealth Services on Tuesday announced a collaboration with LearnVest, which will provide Fidelity IWS RIA and National Financial broker-dealer advisors with preferred pricing on LearnVest's subscription-based digital advice platform. In addition, the partnership will allow advisors to give emerging and mass affluent clients access to a "financial wellness" microsite with content provided by LearnVest.
Mike Durbin, Fidelity IWS president, said in an interview on Tuesday that the LearnVest deal is part of Fidelity's overall practice management and consulting platform for its advisors.
"What we're announcing today is our latest practice management and consulting relationship," which, he said, "happens to be in this digital advice sphere." Durbin says Fidelity's strategy is to offer a "a spectrum of options to augment" advisors' digital advice offerings, based on a "long and thorough" consulting process that gets advisors to understand "what you're trying to solve for."
Durbin wouldn't be specific about the discount advisors would get on providing LearnVest's platform to end clients, saying only that it would be a "meaningful percentage reduction" based on "how many users" signed up. Fidelity will not be receiving any monetary consideration from LearnVest for those users, Durbin said, but pointed out that Fidelity-affiliated advisors and reps (including independent recordkeeper, broker-dealer and family office clients of Fidelity IWS, National Financial and Fidelity Family Office Services) would have free access to the LearnVest content. "We've paid for that," he said.
