We’ve been sponsoring IN|VEST since its inception, and last week’s event in NYC was the best yet. Here’s a roundup of our conference highlights:

It’s all about incumbents:

RIABiz had the most comprehensive overview of the conference we’ve found. Interestingly, the unintentional overarching theme of the conference ended up being one of incumbents trying to overcome the tech disruptors in the industry. And that just so happens to be what our panel with the Aite Group was all about. But fear not, as our CEO Anton Honikman said, “Incumbents, now is your time.”

Highlights from the write-up:

Addressing the elephant in the room in a session entitled “Robo-Advice: Revenge of the Incumbents,” Alois Pirker, research director for Aite Group’s wealth management practice and Anton Honikman, CEO of MyVest, detailed the ways that human intelligence has failed the old guard in financial services.

Large institutions, said Honikman, “are on their back foot, they need to respond. This industry has been ripe for the disruption we have seen in many industries.”

Those forms of disruption include profitability, competition, demographic shifts, regulatory uncertainty and a legacy technology and business model that is the ball and chain around the ankles of the Schwabs of the world, he said. On the screen showing the list of the disruptors was a photo of an orange in a vice with the juice being squeezed out of it.

But the old guys have a plethora of advantages on their side, said Pirker, namely their name and brand recognition, resources and strength in employee numbers.

But make no mistake, Pirker said, “there is tech debt in large organizations,” and “people” can easily turn into a bureaucracy.

That tech debt has driven the big guys into the arms of upstarts, as seen in the alliances between UBS and SigFig Wealth Management LLC, TIAA and MyVest, BlackRock and FutureAdvisor, and Invesco and Jemstep Inc., he said.

 

Live tweets from our session:

 

 

 

And of course, there was our buzzed-about swag:

 

 

MyVest socks best swag of #INVEST2017

 

We had a great time meeting everyone at the event and having thoughtful conversations around the continuing growth of digital wealth. We’re looking forward to IN|VEST 2018!

Learn more about MyVest.