Jon Stein

Betterment is the largest independent investment advisor online.

We manage your money for you in a way that the old institutions can't because we've used technology to automate all the best practices of investing and do them for you automatically.

And that same technology drives the cost down for you.

So you get better investment management at a lower cost than you can get anywhere else.

This service is leading the way in the industry right now, and the industry is all coming after us.

They all want to change their products to be more like ours.

It's an exciting time.

We charge customers a fee that's a percentage of the assets under management.

It's 0.25%, which is the lowest in the industry.

And by charging this one clear, transparent fee, we align ourselves with a customer in a way that the old institutions are not.

The old institutions charge you for transactions, or they're selling products to you and getting commissions for those products.

They have their own funds that they're pushing on you, these kinds of things.

Betterment is an advisor, a fiduciary, which means we have to put our customers' best interests first, and that means we're aligned with our customers, and that translates into how we charge our fee.

Today we manage $8.2 billion.

studied economics and a little bit of behavioral biology as an undergrad.

And those were really where my interests were.

And as I came out of school, I was an economics major, and 80% of the graduating class from Harvard went into finance of some sort.

And at that time, finance, I mean, 80% is a crazy number for people in the industry.

But at that time, 40% of all the financial profits in the US were coming from financial services.

This was 2001 when I graduated.