SigFig, the startup that tracks your financial assets and provides detailed visualizations of your investments and recommendations on how to manage them, is now officially playing in the big leagues.
SigFig tells TechCrunch that it just crossed $50 billion in assets on the site’s platform.* For comparison, that’s in the ballpark of decades-old financial planning stalwarts such as Edward Jones, which reportedly has some $68 billion in assets under management. Not bad for a startup with around 40 staffers that officially launched its app to the public just nine months ago.
SigFig’s growth has almost certainly been bolstered by the fact that it has inked some big-name partnerships in its relatively short lifetime. The company’s technology already powers portfolio trackers for the likes of Yahoo Finance and USA Today, and just recently signed a deal to power brand new portfolio tracker apps for CNN.
It also bears mention that SigFig is not as new of an entity as it seems on the surface. The company was formerly best known for building Wikinvest, the financial Q&A site that also provided portfolio tracker tools — in December 2011, the company had $20 billion in assets under management thanks to Wikinvest users. But I’m told the majority of growth in terms of assets under management has happened over the past nine months with SigFig as the main driver.
SigFig is certainly not the only startup looking to lead the trend of bringing the financial planning industry into the digital realm — Personal Capital and Betterment are just two prominent players also in the space, although it bears mention that they are not all completely direct competitors. Just as there has historically been room for a plethora of traditional financial planning and advisory firms to prosper (and how), we may see a variety of web-based companies to establish themselves as the new generation of money management experts.
*UPDATE: SigFig has reached out to clarify that $50 billion in users’ assets have been plugged into its platform and managed through it. The term “assets under management” is typically used by licensed broker/dealers, which SigFig is not. SigFig users keep at their respective brokerages and sync their accounts with SigFig; SigFig does not actually control money and invest it on its users’ behalf. This story and headline have been updated to clarify that.
Watch the video embedded below for a closer look at what exactly SigFig is; this interview is from May 2012, when co-founders Mike Sha and Parker Conrad stopped by TechCrunch TV to demo their app and talk about their aim to disrupt traditional investment consulting.