Here are the links to today’s top stories:
Robinhood, With No-Fee Trading App, Sees Valuation Soar To $5.6 Billion from Forbes
BlackRock, world’s biggest investing company, is planning to nickel-and-dime you from CNBC.com
BlackRock and Acorns Partner to Expand Financial Participation Among the Next Generation of Investors from PRNewswire
Live with Arcons Technology: Demo of ClientPort and BillPort technology solutions from YouTube
(Promotional consideration for the demo was provided by Arcons Technology. See my full disclosures by clicking here.)
Welcome to the latest FPPad fintech briefing, here are the top fintech stories you need to know today brought to you by Morningstar.
Register today for the 2018 Morningstar Investment Conference and see how they’ve helped lead the investing discussion for 30 years.
Robinhood Raises $363 Million in New Capital
Several investing apps announced new rounds of fundraising this week, with the biggest announcement coming from Robinhood, the commission-free stock and cryptocurrency trading app. Robinhood said it officially raised $363 million in Series D funding, valuing the company at $5.6 billion, confirming a report published by the Wall Street Journal earlier in March. Robinhood says it now services more than 4 million stock trading accounts and has rolled out cryptocurrency trading to users in ten states, although the company declined to say how many users pay for the Robinhood Gold premium membership or whether the company is profitable.
Acorns Raises $50 Million in Round Led by BlackRock
Another company raising new capital is Acorns, as the spare change investing app announced it raised $50 million in a round led by Blackrock, the world’s largest asset manager with more than $6 trillion dollars in assets under management. According to a company press release, Acorns now has over 3.3 million investment accounts on its platform and says Blackrock’s participation won’t influence the allocations among the exchange-traded funds in customer portfolio allocations, which include a mixture of ETFs from Vanguard and Blackrock.
BillPort Supports Complex Adviser Fee Billing
And with all these free apps available for investing, consumers are getting much more sensitive to paying fees, including the they pay for financial advice from their financial advisers. So if you’re a financial professional, how are you managing the different fee schedules you want to support overwhelming your staff with custom spreadsheets to monitor your billing. I recently connected with Hemant Moré to learn more about how his solution called BillPort can address nearly every method an adviser wants to use to calculate fees:
There are some clients who like to prorate the fees, there are some clients who like to provide credits, write offs, discounts, minimum fees, maximum fees, minimum or maximum fees on tiers. So there is a whole different kind of way that each firm behaves, and BillPort can handle many of those situations.
To view the full promotional demo of the BillPort solution, visit fppad.com/flashbriefing for the links to today’s top stories
I’m Bill Winterberg, and those are your fintech headlines for today from FPPad.com. Check back in with me later for more fintech news.
