After a decade of proclaiming that Silicon Valley can build a better, more transparent and more inclusive financial services firm, Wealthfront is going to UBS. And after a decade of standing firmly behind the notion that algorithms can replace financial advisors, Wealthfront’s technology will be joined by human financial advisors.

This isn’t the first time Wealthfront has reversed its stance. After calling Charles Schwab the company’s role model for building a business, former-CEO later published a blog criticizing the brokerage for launching a digital advice product that uses proprietary funds. Then in 2018, Wealthfront launched a proprietary mutual fund in order to introduce a risk-parity strategy that immediately attracted controversy.

And about a year after Wealthfront CIO Burt Malkiel published a blog post criticizing the rise of day trading in the pandemic and detailing research on how trading individual securities underperforms index investing, Wealthfront began allowing clients to customize portfolios with individual securities and cryptocurrencies.

So perhaps joining a traditional bank like UBS is a fitting end to one of the most bombastic fintechs to achieve such significant scale in the industry. After all, $28 billion of AUM is nothing any RIA would scoff at, nor is a $1.4 billion exit price.

But it’s also the end of the era of purely digital, direct-to-consumer robos. After years of fear that the machines would replace the human advisors, it’s clearer than ever that both the old and the new need each other.

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