Betterment Adds 2,500 Accounts With Uber Partnership

By Danielle Andrus

September 05, 2017 at 08:38 AM

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Since announcing a partnership with Uber last year, Betterment has added 2,500 new users, Bloomberg BNA reported.

Betterment announced in August 2016 that Uber would begin offering access to Betterment's platform to drivers in four cities: Boston, Chicago, San Francisco and Seattle.

In the last year, that's been expanded to all Uber drivers in the United States, a number that has nearly doubled since the announcement to 600,000.

Drivers access Betterment through the Uber app and are eligible for special pricing.

Uber drivers are independent contractors rather than employees, and are not eligible for employee benefits like retirement plans or health insurance.

Betterment has nearly 209,000 clients with more than 353,000 accounts, according to its Form ADV filed July 28. Regulatory assets under management are over $10 billion.

Earlier this summer, Betterment announced that it was expanding human advice to all retail clients and eliminating its Plus service tier, which allowed users to communicate by phone with a licensed advisor once a year.

Betterment also lowered its fees and minimums. Former Plus customers were moved to Premium accounts, the minimum balance for which was lowered to $100,000 from $250,000. Fees were lowered to 40 basis points from 50.

— Read Robo-Advisor Betterment Gets $800M Valuation, $70M in New Funding on ThinkAdvisor.