If you’re offering cheap, online investment advice, you need volume to make it profitable. To get volume (ie lots of money), you need marketing (to get lots of people to log in and give you money). And that costs, particularly, as will inevitably be the case, most of your customers are not investing big bucks. If you put your prices up enough to make it profitable, there’s little point, as an investor, in choosing DIY rather than using an adviser. Why do your own plumbing or rewire your house yourself, when it’s as cheap to get a plumber or electrician in, someone you can blame and who can fix it if it goes wrong. And things will go wrong. Certain DIY, insect-related sites will find that ‘put all your pensions in one place’ promotions will come back to sting them in the bottom.
“Is vertical integration good for advisers?”
I think the point here should be, is it good for clients? Vertical integration is not something you find when googling tractors, rather the ownership of the means of distribution by a manufacturer.
