Show HN: Personalized Wealth Management – Institutional Meets Consumer
If you have less than $100k to invest, you get a robo-advisor that asks you 5 questions and dumps you into one of three cookie-cutter portfolios.
If you have more than $100k, you get a human advisor who charges 1-1.5% annually to... basically do the same thing with a smile and calming voice attached.
Meanwhile, institutional investors get custom strategies built around specific durations, target dates, tax situations and actual investment goals. Not because the math is harder—but because the economics only work at scale. Here's the thing: Both traditional advisors and robo-advisors maximize profit by minimizing choice and directing capital into the bias strategies that generate them additional margins. Both just tweak a risk slider and call it "personalization." But institutional-grade portfolio construction doesn't have to be exclusive to the wealthy. The road was paved by platforms like Plaid, brining API connectivity—platforms and asset aggregation into the mainstream. Modern AI completes the picture by making true personalization economically viable via "micro-advise".
No asset transfers, no new custodians, just sophisticated strategies based on your financial goals executed where you already invest coupled with personalized financial planning & budgeting.
Technical Solution:
We've built our MVP wealth management platform that creates truly personalized portfolios by combining institutional capital market expectations stemming 30+ global asset classes. All available through low-fee publicly available ETFs. Our approach:
- SEC licensed & compliant Registered Investment Advisor - Generates unlimited unique portfolio combinations optimized for risk, return & goal specifics.
- Personalizes to individual goals, not generic risk buckets.
- Learns and improves from every user interaction - Provides institutional-grade sophistication without human bottlenecks
- Removes manager bias for in-house strategies - Uses a "glidepath" approach similar to the US retirement target-date structure to maximize achievement certainty of important life goals (down-payment, retirement, etc)
- Seeks to bring elements of habit forming platforms (like Duolingo) into retail wealth. Business Model Innovation:
-Non-custodial + AI architecture enables subscription pricing ($10/month) instead of AUM fees. Users keep control of assets while getting personalized institutional strategies.
Research Validation:
- Glidepath strategies delivered higher values in 76% of scenarios (T. Rowe Price)
- Global diversification outperformed domestic-only in 96% of 3-year periods (Hübner) - Chance of success metrics for significant life goals like retirement & major milestones are measurably improved via behavioral advantages & sequence risk protection (T. Rowe Price).
Early Results:
-Alpha users report 90%+ cost reduction vs. traditional platforms with superior personalization. Institutional style portfolios achieving goal-specific optimization that would cost minimum 10x elsewhere.
-Base model portfolios have outperformed comparable portfolios from existing market incumbent robo-platforms on both an absolute & risk adjusted basis in H1 2025.
What's Different:
This isn't another robo-advisor using basic mean reversion. It's personalization that helps you understands and discover your specific goals and adapts continuously. Think "personal wealth manager in your pocket" rather than "generic portfolio assignment." All that, in a consumer product platform designed to empower retail investors and keep them engaged.
Next Steps:
Currently in invite-only alpha at www.fulfilledwealth.co. We focused early on the portfolio construction & delivery process and are now building out the consumer-facing aspects of the web application.
Looking for feedback from the HN community on our approaches to financial personalization.
The button below this doesn't seem to work.
> If you have more than $100k, you get a human advisor who charges 1-1.5% annually to... basically do the same thing with a smile and calming voice attached.
Maybe the crackpot scam ones. But I'm very happy with Vanguard's 0.15% or Schwab's 0.8% fee. I also personally am paying someone to tell me "no." I like the friction making changes to my portfolio and I like the trust I have with my advisor.
The website says a lot of surface level, "X, Y, and Z doesn't do these things well, but we do it better!" without actually explaining how you doing it better or what is better.
For example, robot advertises allow you to customize your portfolio based on your personal risk appetite. But your website claims they don't allow customizations. I'm guessing you can allow people to be even more specific (focus on income, international, etc) than they offer? But I have no idea why their customization level isn't good enough for me.
> Access the same high-quality investment strategies used by the world's top institutions, not just cookie-cutter limited funds.
I have no idea what "high-quality investment strategies" actually means. My Financial Advisor uses automatic rebalancing tools and tax loss harvesting tools.
Features like "saving for a car" aren't interesting to me.
I'd just argue that even the 0.8% from Schwab is $4,000 on their minimum of $500,000. Where I worked (high networth wealth management at large bank) we had a minimum of 1 million and the starter fee was 1.35% or 13,500 annually. Definitely not a crack pot scam advisor and the portfolio management we did was very similar to what we've built out on this app.
We're doing more advanced portfolio construction at the client level then what you're going to get from Schwab and it's $100 a year vs $4000. If the relationship aspect of the advisory channel is important to you, then totally valid and fair point. This platform is aimed at the middle-market of people who aren't financially able to meet those minimums but want a better service then just automated portfolios.
> Customization
Great point! We would just not consider risk appetite an actual customization. After you've selected your risk, you're placed/bucketed into one of five portfolios that they offer and manage themselves.
What we do is factor in the risk appetite of the user plus the goal itself (whether you have a date you want the funds for or the importance of the goal) and then model it against evolving capital market expectations featuring 30+ domestic & global asset classes, constructing the optimal ETF portfolio to meet your return requirement at the lowest risk possible.
> Investment strategies
Another good point that we need to make more clear. We are modeling these portfolios using an institutional model with a wide range of asset classes and a "glidepath" (target date) structure like the US retirement portfolios. This prioritizes capital accumulation at earlier stages and then de-risks the portfolio gradually to make sure you have the capital you need as you reach your goal. It's a dynamic portfolio that evolves over time.
It’s sounding like you you have a bucket of etfs that you call risky (Russel 2000, emerging market) and things that you call safe (bonds, debt, large cap) and depending on my time horizon and risk I start with a certain portfolio and you systematically roll into more “safe” based on my time horizon?
That's the approach we've taken here. Pooling capital market expectations for 30+ global asset classes and taking into consideration the risk basis, time horizon, the financial goal (ie. is this a general wealth building portfolio or your retirement fund) and then yes, creating rules & heuristics around the type of asset classes that are appropriate for that unique situation. Then as the portfolio ages and your "path" matures (we use a glidepath structure to maintain a volatility cap over the lifetime of the portfolio), the portfolio dynamically adjusts the risk downwards and into a less volatile portfolio that favors capital preservation over accumulation.
All that is done through publicly traded ETFs that represent the asset classes but it's more granular then the way you typed it out. Rather then just being "large cap" it would be "US Large Cap", "ex-US Large Cap", "European Large Cap", "APAC Large Cap", etc. It's not just about risk though, with the most obvious modern example being crypto. Most advisors in 2025 are saying 2.5-5% of a portfolio can go into the asset class but does that make sense if you're investing for a down payment on a house in 5 years? You're going to want higher returning assets that are less volatile like infrastructure equity or private credit (same return profile, less volatile).
The net result is far greater risk adjusted returns and likelihood of actually achieving your financial goals because you've built your overall portfolio piece by piece with the goals as the building blocks.
You must convey and deliver you you are, and why we should consider you in first place. You can write as:- A safe wealth management and optimization space, custom tailored on geographics, demographics, income, areas of expertise....., controlled and utilized by yourself, in guidance from experienced professionals and custom solution or something similar.
And if you're successful with conveying, let that to be tested by alpha or beta users, give the beta access to the HN community or targeted users so that they can feel the difference. You've mentioned the alpha results, but if I haven't seen or someone haven't seen and have access, we can't provide specific POV on core product and features.
Whether it's legit or not, it's seeming like a lot of Show HN posts that make the front page are giving vibes of "Ah, another AI generated tailwind/Stripe template that collects emails and was slapped together in an hour". They have SEC registration but don't have literally any information on their about us for a company I'd need to be able to trust