Why did the Smartly Robo-advisor close down? Anyone knows what happened and will there be more to come?

Answers from the panel!

Michele (Stashaway): Owners of Smartly decided that they were not able to be a profitable company, so they decided to liquidate the business. It was actually not linked to the market crash. If you're a monthly customer of Smartly, they would have sent out an email saying that you could move your funds to Stashaway at a discount, which is why I am aware of this because we offered this to the Smartly owners. Investors withdrew the money, some moved it to Stashaway and some received the cash. They had to liquidate their holdings and reinvest because it was too small and not feasible to create such a complex process to move their funds. However, moving assets and liquidating them actually has the same effect - if one the same day you reinvest in another platform, then nothing will happen, other than the inconvenience.

Sam (Endowus): The way that Smartly unwinds is something that the company has to consider. The way that Smartly is set up is in such a way that they had to liquidate the clients' money. They had to sell down, take that money and reinvest it. This is not optimal, especially due to the timing, it wasn't a very optimal to sell out to the market and difficult to get on to another platform due to various reasons. However, all of us here have robust systems to tackle this issue.

For more discussions on SeedlyTV S2E04, you could check out the video and Q&A here! ​​​

Singapore market pie too small, too many competitors, hard to made a decent profit in the long-term. kinda like how retail banking here in singapore is mainly dominated by the 3 local banks

tbh,i believe it is in the interest of Singapore retail invesots for robo-adviors number to be at most 5. this would give sufficient consolidation of fragmented retail assets, improvement in AUM also means lower fees can be passed down to clients