Autopilot automates your savings plan so you can remove the stress of manually monitoring accounts and moving money
Today, Wealthfront launched an exciting new service called Autopilot that automates a client’s savings plan so they no longer need to manually monitor accounts and move money around. This is a huge milestone toward Wealthfront’s ultimate goal of delivering a nextgen banking service that fully automates their clients’ finances, or what they refer to as Self-Driving Money™.
“Our clients are diligent savers and follow best practices to grow their savings, but they struggle to prioritize managing their finances among a long list of competing priorities,” said Chris Hutchins, Wealthfront’s Head of Autonomous Financial Planning. “This can lead to missed days in the market or missed days of compounding interest, which has a huge negative impact on your long term net worth. Autopilot is your free financial assistant, automating your financial tasks to ensure your savings are put to work immediately in the best account for your goals.”
Autopilot can be set up in just a couple of minutes and monitors your account daily to ensure you only keep the amount of cash on hand that you really need. When your balance exceeds your prescribed amount, Autopilot automatically deposits the money into the account of your choosing. You can choose which account to monitor and save in and you always have full control over the routing if you need to cancel or change it for any reason.
Many of Autopilot’s beta users have been using the feature to take the stress out of monitoring their checking accounts for excess money to invest into the market. This has given them peace of mind knowing they don’t need to constantly check accounts or pick the perfect day to invest. As one early user put it, “I love not having to think about stuff and know it’s being taken care of. It’s nice knowing my money is going to be working for me without thinking about it.”
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Wealthfront co-founder, Dan Carroll, is optimistic about the leap forward towards Self-Driving Money™ and the impact it will have on their clients’ finances. “We’ve set out to build a new system that makes money with our clients, not off of them as traditional banks do,” he says. “The system we’re building has the potential to be one of the biggest wealth creation engines of our generation, automatically optimizing your money in the background while saving you time and stress.”
The next big area of focus for the company will be to improve upon the speed of money movement within the Wealthfront ecosystem. Wealthfront clients already enjoy receiving their paychecks up to two days early when they set up direct deposit with their Wealthfront Cash Account and the company plans to continue to improve upon transfers to deliver services like same day investing.
