Forum Director and BSSE Professor Derek van Bever talks to students about their final paper for the elective course Building and Sustaining a Successful Enterprise.

According to a recent study by consulting firm A.T. Kearney, robo advisors will manage over $2 trillion in the U.S. by 2020. Assets under management (AUM) are expected to increase 68% annually.

For their final essay, Krishna Kantheti and George Rudolph (both MBA 2016) drew on their experiences from working in the financial services industry along with the theories taught in the BSSE course to explain why, as a complete newcomer to the financial services industry, robo advisory company Betterment was able to experience such exceptional growth so quickly ($3B+ AUM in 5 years), how its offering is differentiated from other seemingly similar products by better-known providers, and examine where it should look next.