Before we built our current startup, we spent seven years building retail investment platforms that introduced millions of people to investing for the first time.
Sharesies and Lightyear were highly regulated companies that now manage more than £7 billion in assets, and time and time again customers would ask us: what should I invest in? It frustrated us that we couldn’t help them in any meaningful way.
In moments of extreme volatility, the Trump tariffs, the pandemic, all we could do was send an email that said, in effect, “don’t panic.” Markets go up, markets go down. That was as far as we could go because we had no way to give real advice. So, we watched customers buying high and selling low. It was incredibly frustrating because we just couldn’t help.
In the background, customers were making incredibly complex financial decisions – about retirement, growing a family, inheritance or buying their first home – which weren’t just investment questions but life changing moments, where good advice was critical.
And yet most people weren’t getting it.
That was why we built our company, Marloo. Not so we could provide financial advice, but to make life easier for those who could — financial advisors. These are people drowning in admin and paperwork that removes them from what they love: working with customers.
Just 15 months later, we are averaging 37% monthly revenue growth since inception, have onboarded more than 900 paying advisory firms across eight countries, and are expanding into the U.S. We’re not aware of another company doing this across as many markets as we are. We’ve raised $13 million ($3 million pre seed, $10 million seed), with the two rounds only six months apart.
We started with the hardest, most regulated markets. That groundwork is what let us move into eight countries in 15 months. A new market now takes days, not months.
It is no coincidence that that growth has come at a time when the investment landscape is more complicated than ever. For decades, financial advisors built portfolios by dividing a client’s money across fixed categories such as shares, bonds, property, and alternative investment vehicles. But now, asset classes once off limits to all but the very rich are on the table too.
Assets that were institutional-only are now packaged and sold to ordinary investors, and the minimum ticket has fallen from millions to thousands. The exposure has spread and the labels have not kept up. Millions of people can now buy things nobody has ever had to explain to them.
What that means is that the profile of customers for financial advisers has shifted too. A parent who is about to start paying school fees needs a different portfolio from an entrepreneur preparing to sell a company, even with the same wealth and appetite for risk.
Advisers have to ask more practical questions: Can the client access their money quickly? How does it provide them with income? How might it perform during a crisis? Can they leave it untouched for 10 years?
That has practical consequences, because personal advice takes more time per client than fitting someone into a model portfolio. The best advisers are already full. More personal advice to a broader range of clients means more time — and time was always at a premium.
It has been said repeatedly that AI isn’t going to take human jobs but change them, and that those who learn to harness it will be those that succeed as it improves. But — at least when it comes to financial advice – that is absolutely true.
An advisor cannot easily answer the question of which of their 200 clients an interest rate move will affect the most: their relative exposure is not sitting somewhere in a labelled box. You need to go client by client: what AI can do is narrow that list down to a handful and let the adviser decide what to do for each and own that call.
AI can help advisers model these individual circumstances without spending hours rebuilding every portfolio manually. Human judgement though is what will always be needed to understand which goals matter, and which compromises a client can accept.
This means that as investment categories converge, portfolios must become more personal and not more complicated. The industry must stop fitting people into rigid allocations and start fitting their clients’ money around the lives they want to lead.
We started this company because we couldn’t help the people asking us for advice. Now, by giving advisers back their time, we believe we’re part of a generational shift, one where personal, human advice finally reaches far more people than it ever has.
The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.
The post Our AI startup is growing 40% a month helping financial advisers do what they love: giving advice appeared first on Fortune.
