Betterment

Betterment is a digital financial advisor. At the core, it's a robo-advisor platform, which means they provide consumers with an investment portfolio built in your best interest. This lets you avoid becoming a novice stock/bond trader. Betterment also provides online access to financial advisors. Betterment is an "independent" advisor because it isn't a retail brokerage, like Fidelity or Robinhood, and it also doesn’t build its own investment funds, removing most common conflicts of interest.

Time and effort savings on high-quality investing. It basically takes away the need to figure out how to invest your money. Instead, it does that for you, and you can focus on saving more into the investments — and take back your free time. At the same time, it doesn't cost a great deal, because Betterment reliably sources low-cost funds for its portfolios, and the management fee is just 0.25% of your balance as long as you keep a recurring deposit of $250/month or more.

Betterment charges about a quarter of what traditional investment advisors charge, and it requires far less attention or knowledge than do-it-yourself investing with an online brokerage, like Fidelity, Schwab or Robinhood (the three largest). Because of Betterment's large scale ($50m in assets under management), they’ve been able to achieve a well-sustained platform with low fees. Plus, they have combined that investing strength with reliably consumer-friendly banking services, like high-yield savings accounts.

Betterment also has a history of advocating for consumer protections in the digital advisor space, pushing for more distinction between advisors who act in consumers' best interest and "advisors" that act more like salespeople (usually representing investment fund companies or life insurance companies).

Betterment is on the initial “The Tools of Wayshaping” list because:

• It takes away most of the manual work of investing, making it feels much more like a bank account for people who aren't DIY investors. This has two big advantages: it saves a lot of time and effort; but it also guides non-professional investors away from trying to control what you can't control: the stock and bond markets.
• Betterment incentivizes good behavior in a space where most consumer offerings orient toward bad behaviors, like uninformed active trading, timing the market, and investment in risky assets. For example, Betterment doesn't provide granular access to the time in which investments are bought or sold. And the platform provides reminders and alerts for actions within your control, like limiting the tax impact of a change.
• It’s been shown to actually save people time via their goal-based savings buckets, automated investing, and capital gains tax tools. In fact, one feature quantifies the time saved: their monthly email highlighting your progress toward key goals and time saved in investment operations brokerage users would have to do on their own.