This is a guest post from Hub member Six Park
Six Park is an investment management service known as a “Robo-Advisor”.
Our service is web-based and highly automated, which reduces costs and improves the client experience by making your investment account available on-line, 24/7.
Importantly, our investment management strategy is based on an approach whose authors won a Nobel Prize in Economics. It’s a simple, smart, low-cost way to invest for the medium to long term, and you don’t need to be rich to use it.
Getting professional investment advice used to be the domain of the wealthy ($1 million or more, otherwise a financial advisor didn’t want to talk to you), but the robo-advice model has democratized the way anyone can get their extra funds invested in the share markets with confidence.
We have an amazing team with over 200 combined years of investment management experience.
Our investment strategy is directed by an Investment Advisory Committee that includes i) the former Minister for Finance of Australia, ii) the Chairman of the Investment Committee of Qantas Super (as well as the and founding GM of Australia’s $120 billion Future Fund) and iii) the former Chairman of JP Morgan Australia.
How does Six Park differentiate from typical robo-advice?
We like to call ourselves “Robo Plus”. The “Plus” refers to the fact that the “robot” is only as good as the data provided by the people behind it. This is critical. If you automate a bad way to invest, that’s no good. Our human overlay and active Investment Advisory Board is unmatched in Australia, which builds trust with our clients as we are not just a tech startup, we are real asset managers.
Our target markets are young savers through to mid-life accumulation phase investors. We cater to self-managed super funds (SMSFs) as well as stand-alone funds you may have to invest.
Also, most robo-advisors just have a single offering that is available to all target clients. Six Park is the first robo-advisor to attack a vertical market with a tailored solution to meet a serious pain point, and that is the self-managed super fund (SMSF) market, which is being launched very soon!
Why is this important?
Having a unique team of people behind the “robot”, and having tailored offerings is important because there is a severe lack of trust and limited accessibility in the financial advice market (if you had $15k sitting in a savings account earning 2% and wanted to invest it in a diversified portfolio of shares for long term growth, what would you do?).
There have been many scandals in the financial advice market in Australia, as 80% of the advisor market is owned by the Big 4 banks. So, advisors have previously been compensation by flogging banks’ products to their clients, big conflict of interest.
They also tend to be horribly inefficient, which is why they charge high fees and won’t be interested in smaller accounts (under $1million).
Six Park is not aligned with any bank, and we do not receive any commissions for recommending investment products. Re-establishing trust in the financial advice market and making professionalized advice available to all Australians is Six Park’s mission.
What brought you to Hub and how are you enjoying your time so far?
Our COO, Hugh Peck, looked all over Melbourne at various co-sharing locations.
We chose Hub because it is the right mix of an energetic, start-up friendly environment but not so informal that you can’t get any work done.
We also love the people who work so hard to make our experience here fun and it’s easy to adapt to a new environment.
