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I think I have a different perspective because even though I'm an engineer I worked in finance before and am a huge personal finance nerd. Some of the engineers on my team were impressed with the "sophistication" of our product, but I remember talking to our head of finance and thinking that's it? Even he admitted it was just basic asset allocation strategy. When I talked to our head of finance, he strongly believed Wealthfront (or Betterment) were doing the same thing. We actually back tested our competitor survey's and asset recommendations to ours and it was pretty obvious that all the roboadvisors in the space were building almost exactly the same risk model with very similar recommendations.

At the end of the day it's not a roboadvisor but it's a robo allocater. Frankly asset allocation isn't a hard problem, I've been doing it manually for years.

> Is this so different from what TurboTax does algorithmically? (Depending on how fancy you want to get with the tax savings). Turbotax does not do this at all. It just fills in your tax forms. It does not advise you on tax strategy. To give an example, I'm gonna assume that since you are/were a roboadvisor software engineer, you are most probably out of the income limits of a roth IRA or IRA. If so, did you ever have TurboTax suggest you to do a backdoor roth when filling out taxes? I've filed taxes with TurboTax and I've never them suggest that (not saying they couldn't). My human CPA did though :)

I think your other objections are that automation could do this work. I totally agree. In my original response, I called out that this work could be automated. So yes, I agree in theory that fintech could do this, and I wish they would. But in my viewpoint, I actually don't see this happening. Specifically a lot of the challenges for everyday Americans finance wise are not profitable to serve.

The point I'm making is that a lot of fintech players like to play this marketing game where they are helping out the "common" man against Wall Street with super "sophisticated" products. In my view thats largely marketing, the products are are not very sophisticated and they aren't interested in serving the common man since they can't make easy money off of them.