Monthly Archives: February 2015

Editors note: Bo Lu is the founder of FutureAdvisor.

Shane Leonard recently wrote a doomsday post on this site about robo advisors, whose rapid growth has made the behemoths of finance take notice.

Now that robo advisorshave shown theres a market for low-cost, online investment management, Leonard predicts that the industrys incumbents will copy robos technology and offer similar services at little to no cost, essentially wiping out their nascent rivals.

While that has happened in sectors like online banking, a close look at wealth management shows Leonard is wrong for three reasons: incumbents are slow to start because digital financial advice cannibalizes their existing businesses; they face deep conflicts of interest as advisors; and not enough human experts exist for them to serve middle-class families, where robos dominate.

Leonard cites two examples: One is Charles Schwab, the discount broker and asset custodian, which said last July that it would offer online investment management for free sometime this year. Another example is Vanguard, which came out with its Personal Advisor Service last year, and plans to make human financial advisors available for inexpensive webcam consultations.

Schwab and Vanguard are both great companies, but several structural issues prevent them from competing effectively.

Lets take Schwab: It mooted its free robo-advisory service in July. Three months later, it formally announced the same service. Seven months later, no service.

Every day that Schwab doesnt launch demonstrates the disadvantage large companies have competing against startups in the short-term. Its not the product or engineering ability that slows them down, but the dissonance within an organization acting against its own interests.

Creating a great robo-advisory service undercuts human advisors. That puts incumbents like Schwab at odds with the human advisors who custody assets with them (if those advisors leave, Schwab loses money). So incumbents must manage an internal conflict, and Schwabs strategy will need all the careful attention of their very smart CEO, Walt Bettinger. Theyre walking a very fine line.

In the short run, Schwab is trying to sidestep the conflict by announcing direct-to-consumer robo advice and a re-brandable version for human advisors. That could work. Early disruptive products are always worse than the incumbents by some measures. But as the disruptive product improves and closes the gap between low-priced robo advice and human solutions, a company providing both will be more and more at odds with itself.

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Rumors Of Robo Advisors Deaths Are Greatly Exaggerated

John Green takes issue with a photographic record of colonialism and imperialism

Human Rights, Human Wrongs at The Photographers Gallery, London W1

3/5

Human Rights, Human Wrongs, with more than 200 press prints drawn from the prestigious Black Star collection of 20th-century photo-reportage, is a whirlwind tour through the post-war history of colonialism and imperialism.

According to its curator Mark Sealy, its guiding principle is Article Six of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and, in mounting this exhibition, he seeks to question what the human right to recognition actually means and to make audiences consider how the recognition of such rights is generated and controlled, particularly in terms of image production and circulation.

The images on display are culled from news reportage snapshots taken for the specific purpose of documenting events for the print media and they are not, in the first instance, aesthetic or artistic statements.

The early post-war colonial struggles in north Africa under French rule, Kenya under the British and the wars in Vietnam and Northern Ireland, along with the freedom struggles in Mozambique and Nicaragua, are only a few of the events and places depicted.

Sealys intentions are laudable but whats on display hardly serves to enlighten. There are too many photographs in relatively small formats arranged in tight rows on each wall with tiny captions, often only a few feet from the ground.

While most convey the brutality and violence of imperialist oppression, they lose impact through their sheer overabundance. Others of political personalities, out of their historical context, appear to have little justification for being on display.

What might work better in a book, where particular images can be lingered over and returned to, comes across here as simply a huge collage.

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Morning Star :: Verging on the voyeuristic

Searchers walk back to the command post at Gray Branch FWB Church as numerous law enforcement agencies searched the area Wednesday morning. Suspected human remains turned out to be a bear foot.

DEEP RUN | Where the rest of the bear lies is up for debate, but a dog picked up the remains of its foot and set off a large-scale search Wednesday morning.

Initial examinations of the foot led to debate that it could have come from a person, so investigators and dogs combed woods and creeks in and around Gray Branch under cold overcast skies that fit with the name.

We had a dog that found a foot, and originally the doctor could not determine if it was human, or if it was an animal, Lenoir County Sheriff Ronnie Ingram said. First of all, there was very little meat on it, so really, you couldnt tell. And the next one goes, I think its a human. But, nobody would commit 100 percent.

The State Medical Examiners Office in Greenville took possession of the remains and after a thorough examination, concluded the foot came from the rear left leg of a bear.

But before that determination, law enforcement and search and rescue crews filled the parking lot at Gray Branch FWB Church.

All we knew is the dog brought it up we did not know where it got it from, Ingram said. So, we were having to do a grid search to try to see if we could find anything else.

Among the agencies responding to the scene were the Lenoir County Sheriffs Office, the Johnston County Sheriffs Office, the Wayne County Sheriffs Office, the Arr-Mac Search and Rescue Team from Wayne County, the Coastal Carolina Search Team from Greenville, Greenville Fire and Rescue, Gates County Emergency Services and N.C. Emergency Management. Wes Wolfe can be reached at 252-559-1075 and Wes.Wolfe@Kinston.com. Follow him on Twitter @WolfeReports.

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Authorities: Remains found near Deep Run not human