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March 30, 2015 at 11:24 AM
A Southern California RIA is giving millennials and other investors a mobile tech tool that it hopes will drive traffic to its services.
Gerber Kawasaki Wealth & Investment Management of Santa Monica recently launched My Money Page, which can be used on smartphones and computers to do budgeting, track savings and retirement goals, calculate net worth and pull together bank and investment account information.
“Like the taxi app Uber, we want to make an industry better and more efficient while becoming a dominant player in it,” said President and CEO Ross Gerber, in an interview with ThinkAdvisor.
“Many of our clients live and die on their phones now,” he said, “so being on that real estate is really critical.”
In addition to the functional aspects of My Money Page, the app gives Gerber Kawasaki the opportunity to show the value it can bring to potential clients, and existing ones.
“We took our Twitter feed and put it into the app,” he explained. “This way, clients can see what’s going on [in the markets] and what we are up to. Also, by being on their phone, they have a way to get notifications about market-moving events” or trends the RIA wants to highlight.
In addition, the app features an “activity feed that shows what others are doing, like Steve is working on his budget,” Gerber said. “You can also get pictures, like one of Tahiti, to use in the retirement-goal sections. Nine-tenths of the battle, after all, is getting people to save.”
The Anti-Robo App
The My Money Page app “is an anti-robo-advisor feature,” Gerber says, noting that robo-advisors just focus on building portfolios and not the matters most clients want help addressing.
“What we do that’s key is to work on the life issues and go about solving them with clients,” explained the executive, who notes that Gerber Kawasaki has about 3,000 clients and $330 million in assets under management.
With My Money Page, “Wherever you are, it’s all there, and it’s here all the time. Young people want everything on their phone at any time,” Gerber stated.
