Wealthfront’s Chris Hutchins, head of financial advice automation, will be speaking at Tearsheet’s upcoming Challengers Conference.
Wealthfront launched a new service today called Autopilot that automates a client’s savings plan. With the new service, clients don’t need to manually monitor accounts and move money around.
Automating savings: Autopilot can be set up in just a couple of minutes to monitor an account daily to ensure a client only keeps the amount of cash on hand that she really needs.
- When a balance exceeds a prescribed amount, Autopilot automatically deposits the money into an account of a client’s choosing.
- Clients can choose which account to monitor and save in and they retain full control over the routing if they need to cancel or change it for any reason.
- Autopilot is part of the challenger bank’s approach to self-driving money and fits together with the firm’s checking accounts.
Looking ahead: The next big area of focus for Wealthfront will be to increase the speed of money movement within its ecosystem.
- Wealthfront clients can access their paychecks up to two days early when they set up direct deposit with their Wealthfront Cash Account.
- The company plans to continue to improve upon transfers to deliver services like same day investing.
“Our clients are diligent savers and follow best practices to grow their savings, but they struggle to prioritize managing their finances among a long list of competing priorities,” said Chris Hutchins, Wealthfront’s head of financial advice automation.
“This can lead to missed days in the market or missed days of compounding interest, which has a huge negative impact on your long term net worth. Autopilot is your free financial assistant, automating your financial tasks to ensure your savings are put to work immediately in the best account for your goals.”
Most everyone is incredibly busy, with things we have to do, and things we want to do. Everyone’s days are full. I love the notion of Autopilot – automating consumer’s financial tasks. We launched an alerts feature for BillPay as an example – reminding consumers of a payment or a bill received or due is something they find really helpful when they’re juggling so many things every day. I can imagine that Autopilot users will appreciate the automated simplicity of better investment returns or personal cash management.