The Death of the Lazy Dollar

This is good for any product that wins on the numbers. Low-cost index funds, money market funds and personalized portfolios all look better to a buyer that actually compares.

Direct indexing is a good example. An investor owns the individual stocks in an index, so the portfolio can avoid buying more of an employer stock they already hold too much of, and in a taxable account it can sell stocks at a loss to offset gains elsewhere (tax-loss harvesting, subject to tax rules). This has been expensive to deliver one account at a time, and AI makes it cheaper. It still only makes sense when the benefit is larger than the added fees and complexity.

With Vise, Advisors use the platform to build and manage each portfolio against inputs anyone can measure (fund fees, tax lots, drift from the target, the holdings the client already owns), and the platform rechecks those inputs every trading day to find the best outcome for that client. An agent does not have to trust a brand to evaluate that, it can check the result itself.

It is bad for the old-world asset managers that built their business on what people want subjectively rather than on what can be measured (a name investors grew up with, a wholesaler relationship, a fund family that has always been on the menu). Those preferences carry real pricing power with a human buyer, and in asset management that pricing power shows up as premium fees for general market exposure and cash that earns close to nothing. An agent does not share any of those preferences. Money was already leaving these products before agents showed up (approximately $522 billion in net outflows from active equity funds in the 12 months through September 2026, against $1.34 trillion in net inflows to passive funds across asset classes).² Agents speed that up.