Wealthsimple Acquires Investment Research Platform Fey Labs
- Kendrick Wakeman, CFA
- 3 minutes ago
- 1 min read
We have a little end-of-Summer romance going on north of the border as Wealthsimple, the Toronto-based personal trading and investing platform, acquires Fey Labs, the investment research platform based in Montreal. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
The rationale seems fairly straight forward: provide traders with easy-to-use, informative research tools and gain market share through customer delight. That in itself does not really hit any of our themes, but it is a prelude to building an installed base that can subsequently be used for advice leadgen, which is a very strong theme in our view.
While we do see this as additive and smart, what we really want to see is self-directed trading platforms go after the whole financial relationship. Personal financial apps like the old Mint and YNAB offer extraordinarily and embarrassedly poor handling of investment accounts. Personal Capital was on the right path, but maybe not banking enough. It would be nice to have an app that you can just open, see everything, do everything and be done with it. I pitched this to Intuit back in 2012. Still waiting.