Fidelity Launches Robo Platform for Advisors

(Related: Vanguard Is Way Ahead in the Robo Race)

Some highlights of AMP:

• Using eMoney, clients can onboard themselves, set goals and, by connecting to Fidelity's brokerage capabilities, open and fund their accounts. They can then use a one-stop client dashboard to monitor their investments.
• Clients and advisors can access the same platform, allowing them to collaborate on planning and investments.
• Advisors can move clients from strictly automated service to a more collaborative one and manage their digital and more traditionally advised clients all in one place, which simplifies the workflow.
• Advisors can adjust the combination of human and digital advice for individual clients as their assets and needs change (61% of investors prefer advice that combines technology with personal interactions, according to Fidelity Research). 
• Advisors using another digital advice strategy can integrate with select third-party vendors via additional APIs (application programming interfaces), and they can apply their own branding to the end-investor portal, including the creation of their own investor profile questionnaire (IPQ).

Beginning next year, AMP will roll out additional capabilities for select advisors to customize client portfolios further, based on clients' risk tolerance and their IPQs.

The AMP platform currently includes 14 investment models – seven taxable, seven non-taxable — consisting of passive index funds from BlackRock's iShares and Fidelity itself, for a fee of 15 basis points excluding ETF fees.

Several clients have already signed on to the new platform and a strong pipeline of banks, BDs and RIAS are committed to the offering, according to Fidelity.

The official AMP launch comes just a little more than a year after Fidelity introduced Fidelity Go, its robo-advisor for retail clients, and more than two years after Schwab launched Institutional Intelligent Portfolios, its robo offering for advisors. The market leader, however, is Vanguard Personal Advisor Services, a hybrid offering combining digital and human advice, with assets of $83 billion, about four times the assets of Schwab.

— Related on ThinkAdvisor:

• Advisors Focus on Markets and Downside Protection: Fidelity
• Vanguard Puts Rival Firms on Notice: Fee Wars Will Only Heat Up
• Fidelity Trims Index Fund Fees, Challenging Vanguard
• eMoney Advisor Unveils Virtual Reality, Optimized Marketing Tools