BrightPlan Launches ‘Hybrid-Robo’ Advisory Service

A new robo-advisory platform has hit the market, under the moniker BrightPlan.

BrightPlan is built on the advisory experience of Plancorp and incorporates Nobel Prize-winning research into its methodology, according to the firm. In addition, BrightPlan has been certified by the Centre for Fiduciary Excellence (CEFEX), showing the platform follows a certain set of best fiduciary practices to provide clients with a service they can trust to act in their best interest.

BrightPlan Founder and CEO Marthin De Beer says the inspiration to create BrightPlan “was to provide everyone access to trusted, affordable financial advice in order to achieve life’s most important goals.”

Important to note, according to the firm, clients are not required to invest through BrightPlan in order to receive financial planning advice. They can manually input external account balances or link external accounts from more than 10,000 financial institutions to BrightPlan, which will monitor goal progress and provide advice to stay on track. For example, BrightPlan will recommend a diversified portfolio of stocks and bonds for a client’s existing external 401(k) account based on a defined retirement goal.

Those who choose to invest through BrightPlan will benefit from automated saving and investing in low-fee mutual funds and exchange traded funds, the firm says. BrightPlan additionally “handles all the details including automated contributions, rebalancing, dividend reinvestment, and tax loss harvesting.”

Clients can choose a digital-only service or a hybrid service, which taps the experience of wealth managers from Plancorp, a subsidiary of Prumentum Group.

“We have collaborated with the BrightPlan team to integrate our 30 years of experience working with high-net-worth individuals, families and institutions, into proprietary algorithms and approaches which are now available via BrightPlan,” explains Chris Kerckhoff, president of Plancorp. 

As the firms lay out, the demand for a mass market fiduciary financial service is fueled by the largest transfer of wealth in history. Millennials and Generation X are expected to inherit $30 trillion of wealth over the next two decades and their needs, according to BrightPlan, “are not being met by traditional firms.”

To be clear, BrightPlan and Plancorp are both subsidiaries of Prumentum Group, Inc. More information is available at www.prumentum.com.