Ant-Backed Chinese Robo Adviser BangNiTou Tops Million Users

BangNiTou, a robo-adviser service backed by Vanguard and Ant Group, has reached 1 million users, according to Bloomberg.

BangNiTou means “help you invest,” and the service is the most popular fund investment service in China, Bloomberg reported. The company’s 800-yuan (about $122) minimum investment also helped to engage users. The company works by recommending a portfolio selected from 6,000 mutual funds after assessing a user’s comfort with risk and investment goals.

Assets under BangNiTou spiked 60 percent at the end of February from last year, now sitting at 6.9 billion yuan (about $1.1 million), Bloomberg reported.

This month, Vanguard said it would be giving up its stand-alone fund strategy and instead using the joint venture, aiming for a bigger part of China’s $3.2 trillion mutual fund sector, according to Bloomberg.

The robo-advisory market in China is strong, expected to hit $1.1 trillion by 2027, Bloomberg reported. The interest has caused traditional financial institutions and a number of FinTech startups to begin looking at ways to enter the market, including state-backed giants like Industrial & Commerce Bank of China.

Huang Hao, president of Ant’s digital finance business group, said the robo-advisory industry is “still at an early stage” but that there is “significant potential for rapid growth,” according to Bloomberg.

In the U.S., the advent of more stimulus checks this past week has the potential to drive more people to invest in the stock market. The amount invested will depend on age and income level.

Evidence from the U.S. Census Bureau found that there are around 15 percent of people looking to either save or invest the money. And, a Bank of America analysis found that retail investing would likely remain a force to be reckoned with for the time being, with a younger, more aggressive cohort of investors now entering the stock market.