PlatformSep 27 2018

Robo-adviser teams up with Santander

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Robo-adviser teams up with Santander

Robo-adviser Scalable Capital has partnered with Santander to develop a white labelled online investment service.

The service has been developed for Openbank, Santander's digital arm, and will be made available to clients in Spain today (27 September).

Scalable Capital, in which BlackRock has a large minority stake, has been growing in part due to its business-to-business strategy, which has seen it enter into partnerships with Siemens and ING.

Florian Prucker, co-founder of Scalable Capital, said: "Working closely with BlackRock we’ve delivered a customer-friendly solution that showcases the modularity of our technical infrastructure and demonstrates the breadth of potential B2B implementations.

"This model is therefore representative of other cooperations that we’re currently working on. Our joint focus with Openbank is now on getting as many customers as possible excited about this digital wealth management service."

As part of the new service, Openbank clients can choose from five different risk categories, each holding different asset allocations. Underlying investments are index funds instead of exchange traded funds because there is a preferred tax treatment of index funds in Spain.

The minimum investment amount has been set at €500 (£446) to reflect the young investor portfolio of Openbank customers.

Diversification of smaller portfolios is achieved through a ‘fractional dealing’ service which allows the trading of index funds.

Savings plans can be set up free of charge and the service is also currently provided free of charge, with tiered costs being introduced in 2019 in accordance with the volume of investments, But Openbank has said it will never charge clients more than 1 per cent.

Adam French, co-founder of Scalable Capital, added: "We are not only striving to be the leading digital wealth manager for private investors in Europe, but also to establish ourselves as the European B2B platform of choice for digital wealth management solutions.

"We are very pleased that Openbank is now using this platform to offer customers digital investment management starting at €500."

Earlier this year Scalable Capital passed through the €1bn (£892m) of assets threshold after launching in 2016.

damian.fantato@ft.com