If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em, as they say, and UBS is looking for new ways to use its collection of customer data to compete with new tech-based asset allocation firms coming from Silicon Valley companies. UBS awarded $30,000 and a potential contract to Sqreem Technologies, a Singapore-based company that uses artificial intelligence to deliver personalized financial advice, for winning the bank’s Innovation Challenge. The contest tasked 80 teams with extracting the most relevant client information from a set of data and delivering it via mobile devices.
Vanguard is looking to use its resources as an asset management company to make a big push into the financial advice market by promising to offer services for a fraction of the average cost of financial advisors. Using online tools like video chats and a massive investment in robo-advisor platforms to avoid infrastructure costs, Vanguard promises to offer portfolio advice for just 0.3 percent of assets annually, compared with the industry average of at least 1 percent. (Registration required)
When buying high-end art, few, if any, do their due diligence in finding out what exactly that Popeye statue or Marilyn Monroe portrait is actually worth. When billionaire investor Ronald Perelman sued art gallery owner Larry Gagosian because he felt misled over the price of Jeff Koons' Popeye statue, the New York courts said he should have known better. According to Associate Justice David Friedman: "As a matter of law, these sophisticated plantiffs cannot demonstrate reasonable reliance because they conducted no due diligence; for example, they did not ask defendants, 'Show us your market data.'"