Good morning, everyone. Thanks for staying with us here on day two of Morgan Stanley's Financials conference. I'm Mike Cyprys, Equity Analyst covering brokers, asset managers, and exchanges for Morgan Stanley Research. For our next session, I'm thrilled to welcome David Fortunato, CEO of Wealthfront, and Alan Imberman, the Chief Financial Officer. Welcome. Thanks for joining us here.
Thanks for having us, Mike.
As many of you may know, Wealthfront is a tech-driven consumer financial platform providing digital saving, investing, borrowing, and lending solutions with over $90 billion of total platform assets, including about $45 billion of investment advisory assets. Thanks for making it out here. I thought we could start off big picture on the business. You recently went public, so it'd be great for those maybe a little bit less familiar with your story to maybe get just some quick intros on yourselves as well as a little bit of an introduction to the business from both a strategic and a financial perspective.
Sure. I'll start and then let Alan go. I'm David Fortunato. I was the CTO of Wealthfront, actually, from the time it was a couple people in a converted dry cleaner in downtown Palo Alto, for 10 years. Then I took on more responsibility for the business. We started as a low-cost financial advisor, helping mostly 20-year-olds at the time, in the 2010, 2011 era, diversify and invest, get the benefit of Tax-Loss Harvesting. We added Direct Indexing shortly after that. As our clients aged, we added financial planning tools. We added cash management and then liquidity features to the cash management tools.
Now offer a range of products, from managed investing to more self-directed investing, including standalone Direct Indexing products for the S&P 500 and Nasdaq-100, bond ladder products, and a range of cash management and liquidity features, including FDIC sweeps, treasury money market funds. Our goal is really to help young professionals, digital natives born after 1980, get a digital wealth management solution that works for them. We want to give them the same experience at midnight as we do at noon. Everything that we do is from the perspective of a technology first. Half of our employees are software engineers. I was the CTO. Everything that we deliver to clients, we prefer and our clients prefer be delivered digitally. I'll let Alan.
Yeah. I'm Alan Imberman, the CFO of Wealthfront. I've been with Wealthfront for a little over 10 years. To give you kind of a size and scale of the business, as Michael mentioned, we reported last week, actually on Thursday, that at the end of May, we had $99 billion of total assets under management. A little over or just under 1.5 million clients, which was 15% year-over-year growth. These are extremely attractive clients because if you run that math, that's about $67,000 per client on the platform. Last year, we also did in FY 2026, which ended January 31, 2026, we had about $365 million of revenue, and well over 40% EBITDA margins. Extremely cash flow positive, very high free cash flow conversion rate.
The business model, as David mentioned, because we're highly automated, mostly software engineers, and that's the way our clients actually prefer to enjoy the product, we are able to generate a lot of savings. We have a 90% gross profit margin. We use that savings to share with clients in the form of extremely low rates on advisory, a quarter of 1% for our flagship managed investment account. We have 4.7% margin rates, and we offer 3.3% base cash management fee. I'm sorry, cash management interest rate. We're passing on all of our savings that we get from being automated and efficient to clients that helps them have better outcomes, which leads to trust.
Trust helps cause the client to refer us, which usually is about 50% of new client growth is referrals, allowing us to keep our cost of acquisition down for new clients, making us profitable, reinvesting that back in the business through new products, further efficiencies, and so on with the flywheel. That's a little bit about the financial size and scale as well as business model.
Great. You mentioned cash, which has been a hot-button topic across the industry. Cash sorting, cash optimizers, big topic. Along with AI, which clearly will have a role in consumer finance broadly. I think you guys recently teased about experimenting with some client-facing products. Can you share a little more on what you might be experimenting with as well as bigger picture on how you think about AI and the role it could play in your business over the long- term?
For more than a decade, we've been saying that we think that technology should replace financial advisors, for especially the younger generation. I think the older generation has a view that they like the human interaction. I can say that with a high degree of confidence that folks in their 20s, 30s, and early 40s tend not to want to talk to people about almost everything that they do, whether that's buy groceries or get a ride. They would much prefer a digital solution. The thing that large language models generally unlock is the ability to translate natural language into tool calls, right? When you think about the set of features and products that we've built, the low cost that we have to operate it, we have financial planning models. We have the investment accounts and ability to invest.
We have the ability to route funds, money markets, and high-yield cash savings. They give you a natural language interface to do that routing and to be able to understand the client. We've actually had a cash routing feature live on our site for more than six years. It's called Automated Savings Plan, which previously we called it Self-Driving Money. This is something that we've offered to clients, and there's a number of clients who use that product and love that product. The natural language interface and the ability to do that in a more conversational way will help some folks use that in a way that they're happy with. Some folks are still going to prefer other interfaces, and we'll offer those other interfaces to clients as well.
Great. A big focus of yours recently has been driving asset-weighted cross-product adoption. Can you talk through the rationale of this focus and what you're doing to drive this action?
Yeah. We lead with cash when rates are high as a new client acquisition tool. We lead with investing when rates are low. We're adding home lending, which will be another product leader in a low-rate environment. What we've seen is, as we enter a transition environment, as rates fall or rates rise, that's an opportunity to broaden and deepen our client relationships. As rates fell towards the end of 2025, it became a more macro positive environment for clients to be able to adopt investing. You see a natural flow of clients and assets to open investing accounts. We have a range of investment accounts, which has improved our cross-product conversion because we can meet the client with whatever the product that they want or need is. We've also seen incentives play an important role in driving cross-product adoption.
We've experimented with a number of incentive types. The incentive that we have now is a cross-product adoption incentive. If you direct deposit into your cash management account and have a funded investment account, you get an elevated APY on your cash savings account. That's been very successful at driving cross-product adoption. We experimented with deposit matches and other types of incentives for clients. Ultimately, a very clear delivery of value for the product that they already like is what drove significant cross-product adoption, where folks were interested in opening investment accounts. I think towards the end of last year, we were running about 59% of assets were held by clients who had both cash and investing accounts. Now we're at 63%. The other thing that's been interesting is as the markets have done well recently, the percentage of investment-only clients has also increased.
The percentage of cash-only assets has actually fallen from [both] ends.
Maybe you could talk about the different types of products and accounts that you have today.
Sure. The managed investment account started as a low-cost, diversified portfolio of ETFs. We added Tax-Loss Harvesting. We added Direct Indexing. As we've done more with cash, we saw the need to offer a wider range of investment products. At the low-risk end, we have a bond ladder, where we'll buy treasuries and roll those over for clients. I would encourage folks to take a look at it, because if you've ever seen a bond ladder on one of the large platforms, you'll generally see a list of holdings sorted by CUSIP, and our user experience, I think, is quite dramatically different and much more user-friendly from that perspective. We have a bond portfolio, which is a little bit more yield, a little bit more risk. We have the managed investing product, and the ability to customize that has come in.
We offer a range of different flavors of managed investment products, the ESG, the classic, et cetera. The standalone Direct Indexing product. For nine basis points, we'll run a Direct Indexing portfolio tracking the S&P 500. For 12 basis points, we'll run a Direct Indexing portfolio tracking the Nasdaq-100. Both are either cost competitive or better than ETF prices that you would see in the space. We have what's turning into a generic brokerage account, we call Stock Investing, to primarily work as a consolidation product and to help folks that do want to place some individual investment decisions that they want to make on their platform.
Is that a more recent addition?
Yes. In the last couple of years.
What are the capabilities on that brokerage site today relative to where you would like that to be over time?
It will be a generic brokerage account over time. It started as a way of saying, "You give us an asset allocation, and as you add money to it, we'll manage to that asset allocation," which I think is popular with a small group of clients. It's a mix of individual stocks and ETFs, generally what we get from clients. As we've continued to build that product, what we've seen is clients have a lot more familiarity with a generic brokerage account. I think that's what we'll do as a consolidation product as we continue to evolve it.
Today it has full self-directed, or not quite yet?
It does nearly everything it needs to do for self-directed for equities. There's more for us to do over time.
Got you. Why don't we shift gears? The market has been quite resilient year- to- date, despite a lot of things going on around the world and around different sectors and industries. Fed funds futures curve suggesting perhaps maybe some hikes ahead. Talk through some of the client behavior that you're seeing today on your platform and how you would expect net deposit behavior to evolve as you look out from here, too.
Yeah. We have seen pretty big shifts in investment sentiment among our clients over the past few months. At the end of every month, we do a representative sample of our clients, pretty standard investment sentiment survey. The end of February, investment sentiment was quite good. We run it the end of every month. The end of March, investment sentiment was quite bad. It sort of halfway recovered in April and then fully recovered in May. Throughout that period, we saw more investment interest in January and February, a significant decline in investment interest in March and April, and a recovery into May. Our goal is obviously to help our clients optimize their cash, optimize their investments, and we want to help them do that in any macro environment and throughout the cycle.
We do find that clients respond better to investment offers in some conditions and respond better to cash offers in other conditions. As there's been a lot of volatility, I think our products are good because we're managing them for clients rather than clients having to go make decisions. When clients feel a little bit of a pullback in the market, we tend to be a good option for new clients coming onto the platform because they're looking for someone else to take responsibility and manage their assets. Every time there's been a big historical run-up in asset prices and then there's a little bit of a pullback, there's always a group of clients that learns the lesson that they don't really want to be day trading their accounts. Those clients graduate to Wealthfront.
They graduate to a managed account where we're taking care of it for them, and we're helping that account compound over years.
Why don't we shift gears and talk about the cash fee rate. There's been some discussion on your cash fee rate following the most recent quarter. Can you just walk through some of the dynamics there of what impacts this rate and how we can go about sharpening our understanding of the dynamics underpinning that?
This is a good question because I know there were analysts and investors who didn't have this modeled in. In Q4, we gave guidance that in Q1, which ends April 30th for us, we would have between 57 and 58 basis points on our cash fee rate. We came in right in guide, 57.6. We also provided May's month-end exit rate to help people understand where the fee rate was, and that was 54 basis points. Two of the basis points decline was the decline in the Fed funds rate within the range, which began on May 7th. When the Fed funds rate goes up within the range, we get the benefit, and when the Fed funds rate goes down within the range, we take the detriment there. It's typically pretty stable.
It had been 364 for quite a long time since the last rate cut, it did drop to 362. Those 2 basis points came out. On a Fed funds neutral basis, we would've been at 56 basis points at May exit. The things that can affect it are obviously when rates get increased or decreased, there's compounding conversion going from an APR to an APY. That's about kind of rule of thumb, one basis points for every 25 basis point increase or decrease. That was actually a large driver of the year-over-year decline in our fee rate for Q1 was the three rate cuts that happened last year. As I just mentioned, the Fed funds effective moving within the range can affect the fee rate within a quarter or a period.
The more recent incentive we offer, which gives folks a 25 basis point boost on their cash fee rate, or I should say cash interest rate. Going from 330 to 355, if they start a direct deposit with at least $1,000 a month and open an investment account with us and fund it, that will obviously bring the cash fee rate down as that gets adopted more. What you saw, that began on March 2nd, there was a small amount of that within the quarter ending April 30th and some of that affecting the May exit rate. Those are kind of the big items that affect the fee rate.
I would just add on the upside of the incentive, we're seeing several thousand dollars more of monthly net deposits for folks that adopt the Cross-Product Adoption Incentive, Direct Deposit Incentive. Because our clients are relatively high earners, the average client earns around $150,000 a year, the Direct Deposit benefit is quite strong with our client base and leads to our clients earn more than they spend every month, they're saving monthly. Being the first destination for that savings to go is quite beneficial from a compounding net deposit perspective.
Just on that Direct Deposit, I guess, what are you seeing in terms of an attach rate so far, where do you think that can get to?
It's early. We're pushing it to specific clients and targeting it to where we think that it will be most valuable. There's some demographic characteristics that make it, I think, more interesting for us. We're being somewhat selective in the way that we drive adoption of the incentive. Obviously, it's available to any previous client or future client on the platform. When we're promoting it, we're somewhat selective about it.
How much has been the uptake so far on Direct Deposit?
I think the last thing we disclosed was in the prospectus. We have around 20% of clients that have some form of recurring or direct deposits. An ACH pull, whether that's into an investment or a cash account, as well as kind of a traditional direct deposit. I think we're seeing within that is the direct deposit number.
Okay.
That's obviously gone up since we've launched the incentive, but as David mentioned, it's so far been kind of an intentional rollout. We haven't talked a little bit further about how it's progressing. You can see some of that come out of the fee rate, obviously, but it is, on the fee rate side, going to be important around the level of cash assets that get the boost, not necessarily the percentage of clients that get the boost.
The 20% figure that you referenced, that's 20% of clients?
That is of clients, yep.
To me, seems like a pretty attractive number. I guess how would you sort of comp that or think about where that is relative to others, or where you'd like that to be over time?
It can always be better.
Okay.
We think it's quite good. I guess what I would say is we want to be able to support clients with how they want to grow their accounts over time. If that's a recurring deposit because they have a need to do a direct deposit elsewhere, that's fine with us. If they want to do a direct deposit to us, we want to be able to support that. We have all of the automated routing features for the direct deposit. As an example, I have a home loan from COVID era. I direct deposit into my Wealthfront account. I have an automated withdrawal set to go out to pay my mortgage. All of that is done automatically. It routes itself. It then can route from my cash management to my investment accounts. All of that happens without me doing anything.
That's a great segue to my next question, which is on home lending. That's a newer offering for you guys. Talk through your vision for this offering, and what differentiates your offering in the marketplace and your ability to deliver here.
Post-financial crisis, there was a big shift in the home lending market. One of the things I think in the way the space has grown up since then is mortgage brokers spend many thousands of dollars to be able to acquire someone who is in the course of buying a home to be able to compete for that home loan. What we have seen is with a pool of around 1.5 million clients who are relatively high earners, are at the stage in their lives where they are buying homes. Our clients are spending billions of dollars a year on down payments.
If we can give them the same sort of value proposition that we have in cash and investing, which is to share savings and give them a great rate and a great digital experience, we have a pool of clients who will very happily work with us on a home loan. We acquired a small company more than one year ago that had a number of licenses. We built a digital point-of-sale system for the home lending space. We're general availability in Colorado and Texas and early access in California today. Licensed in 27 states, covering more than 60% of our client base today. We're thinking about the rollout, obviously rates have moved higher in the mortgage space in the past month or so.
We're trying to optimize the learning and the quality of data that we're getting for clients going through that flow so that we can improve the client experience and sort of meet client expectations or exceed client expectations who are originating home loans. We're doing enough volume today that we're getting great data on what we need to improve in the process and pipeline, making those improvements rapidly. It's, I think, a product that will turn into a big opportunity for us, just as our clients age and continue to buy houses, but also in a lower rate environment. When you think about the construction of the business, cash does well in a high rate environment, investing does well in a lower rate environment. Mortgage is another thing that will do well in a lower rate environment, which we feel like is important.
How do you think about push-pull dynamics between third-party partnership versus kind of going it yourself, building out the tech, at the same time, also the balance sheet taking on that?
Yeah, we're doing non-delegated lending, so it's a balance sheet light model. The loans are sold shortly after they're originated. We may move to a different structure at some point in the future, but when we've looked at sort of the development of cash management and investment management, we started in the 2010 era in investment management with a fully disclosed brokerage relationship, where we were reliant on a partner for tax reporting and all of the rest of the activity. We took on more responsibility to deliver a better client experience over time. We did the same with cash management, where we worked closely with a partner, we took on more of the individual responsibilities over time.
I would expect a similar trajectory where we work closely with partners at the start, if we see areas where we can make the client experience significantly better, the rate we're able to deliver from an automation perspective significantly better, we'll take on whatever responsibilities are necessary to be able to deliver a better client experience.
Great. Why don't we talk about customer cohorts. When you look across your platform today, what are you seeing there in terms of interesting takeaways from customer cohort behavior? When clients come to Wealthfront, what products do they typically start with, and how does that relationship evolve over time?
Rates are high enough today that most clients are still starting with cash. The thing that is interesting is I think every month for the last nine months, monthly cohorts have adopted investing at a higher start rate and a steeper adoption curve. Some of that is the incentive. I think some of that is macro conditions. Some of that is the way the products are designed to work. Our clients, in general, have been younger over the last year than our median client. I would sort of expect that to be a trend that continues forward in the future, where we're bringing on clients earlier in their journey than the clients that we brought onto the platform in 2010, 2011, who are 15 years older today. I think our average client is around 35 years old.
The average new client is in their mid-20s. The referral behavior is very interesting and different among clients of different ages. I would say the referral growth among younger clients is quite strong, and has been a tailwind to our building new client cohorts over time. Yeah, I think that covers it.
Anything notable that you've learned about timing and triggers that cause client to adopt additional products?
Shifts in the macro environment are important. News coverage is important. We've always said that when stock indexes hit new all-time highs, that tends to drive a lot of push notification activity, which tends to drive a lot of site traffic, which tends to drive a lot of additional adoption and engagement. One of the things I think is interesting about our business relative to other fintechs is that our client activity on the site is actually, it's not something that we optimize for or really ever try to drive. If someone wants to visit Wealthfront and look at their finances, they're welcome to do that any time of day from a phone, from a computer. Our monthly actives have been over 80% basically for the last decade. They engage quite heavily with the product.
It's part of ultimately the most important thing that we do is build trust with clients. I think that giving them a good experience when they come to the site, they're willing to keep more of their money with us than they would on other platforms. There is a lot of activity on our site. There is a lot of engagement kind of consistently on our site. As we learn more about what clients are trying to do with their finances, that both gives us an opportunity to offer them products that we have today, but also build products in the future that will be able to help them, as their financial situations get more complex. One of the things that we've seen do quite well for us recently is a larger household experience.
A few years ago, we added joint account management, which gave folks the ability to share accounts with a partner or spouse. Full joint accounts with joint cards has been an important driver. As our clients have gotten a little bit older, they've wanted the ability to, I would say, selectively share information about their finances with a partner or fully share information about their finances with a partner, and share accounts as necessary. That's been an area where clients have adopted Wealthfront more deeply into their financial lives as their financial lives have gotten more complicated because of getting married or something like that. It's an opportunity to deepen relationships with clients.
Beyond the products that we've talked about, more broadly, how are you thinking about product roadmap over the next couple of years?
As clients get older, get more financially sophisticated, have to take on more responsibility, I think there are big opportunities for us around tax planning and preparation. I think there are opportunities around estate management, trust and will. We actually manage a relatively large amount of trust accounts today from an asset perspective. The accounts work quite well with that structure. The ability to streamline that process is something that I think will be beneficial to us, along with being able to provide financial advice around how clients might want to structure their estate management plans going forward in the future. The more that we can make that a conversational interface or a few clicks to be able to get that done, the better.
How do you think about the power of AI and agentic solutions to help deliver on your vision as you think about digitizing the financial advisor, if you will, for the younger generation?
If you think about what financial advisors do, they're basically a natural language interface to whatever SaaS solution that they're operating to simulate people's finances, right? They're sitting down with you, they're having a conversation, they're extracting your financial situation, whatever data that they need to be able to run. They're going back, they're typing in or on their phone or laptop into a SaaS provider that runs some Monte Carlo simulation about your financial future and is matching that up and suggesting products, ultimately producing a financial plan that then they're translating into natural language and communicating to you.
I think to build a great financial advisor in a digital-first way, you need both the natural language interface, you also need the ability to do all of the financial simulations, all of the analysis, and then be able to have the products and tools to be able to put that into effect with basically no effort on the client perspective. As we continue to build the natural language interface, along with building the financial modeling and financial tools, I think we're well-positioned because of the decade or so of work that we've put into the financial modeling and financial tools that we can take action on immediately.
When you think about the demographic or the client set that would be most a focus for you with this offering over time, I guess, I mean, clearly it seems it's the younger cohort, but is there a certain wealth spectrum that you're focused on in the market, under a certain amount, over, or a range or something like that? How do you think about where your target market for that opportunity?
I think we're good for anyone who is starting to save money to folks that have tens or hundreds of millions. Our largest client has more than $100 million on the platform today. We're not going to have the offerings that, for example, a Morgan Stanley private wealth manager would offer with private equity or private credit related funds. We're going to focus on highly liquid quality products that we feel give our clients the best opportunity to grow their wealth. If you think about the wealthier clients from a core satellite perspective, our view is that our offerings for the core of their portfolio are going to be difficult for anyone else to compete with because we have the lowest cost to produce those services.
That doesn't necessarily mean we're always the lowest cost provider, it does mean that we have a structural advantage in being able to, because of the automation that we have so deeply in our brokerage infrastructure and banking infrastructure, the ability to offer products at lower cost to us than anyone else does.
Coming back to your earlier description of your sort of natural language interface that you're sort of assembling here. How do you think about solving for the other aspects of what advisors provide, which is also behavioral coaching, holistic, multigenerational financial planning, tax, estate? How do you think about that broader set, particularly as you look more upmarket at high net worth, ultra high net worth? How do you think about replicating that? What aspects are easier to do? Where do you think you are on that journey? What are some of the steps you're going to be taking in the coming years to try and close that gap?
What I'd say is it's really easy to build a solution. It's really difficult to build a solution that ultimately increases trust in the offering. The basic advisor intake flow and getting the data from the client and building the account links that keep that data flowing consistently so that that plan can be kept up to date constantly and in real time, is not a difficult problem. The difficult problem is being able to not overstep with a client, not ask for too much information to go with what they're trying to do. For example, the intake flow that we can run today, the full version of it can take many hours for a client to run through. Asking a 23-year-old about what they want to do for intergenerational wealth transfer with their potential future kids is not worth the time to do that.
Being able to calibrate intake flow so that it leads to a good experience, and then as their trust in the relationship grows, that you're able to expand and extend that relationship and plan forward is important. I would say that the quality of the current Frontier models is extremely good for being able to offer, I think, extremely high quality financial advice. They're aware of a large number of issues. If you give them pools of information about estate management issues, they're quite good at being able to access and surface the relevant information to clients. A good intake experience which solicits a good level of information from the client can, I think, put you in a position to be able to leverage that information extremely efficiently.
We're just about up on time, final question on the financial algorithm here for the business as we look ahead. What are some of the biggest drivers of revenue growth from here? As you scale, where is the most room for operating leverage, and how do we think about the financial algo here?
The algorithm is quite simple. If you look at kind of the growth of millennials, which the Fed defines as anyone born after 1980, but would also include Gen Z, their wealth is projected to grow at about 11% compound annual growth rate for the next couple of decades. They had about $16 trillion in assets at the end of 2024. By 2045, that's projected to be $140 trillion. We're going to benefit from this double-digit growth from our existing clients. We bring on quite a lot of new clients every period. That could add another, call it, 3%- 7% of growth annually. Clients start throughout the year, so you don't get the full benefit of the revenue. Not everyone's starting on January 1. You overlay on top of that new products.
You're looking at a high- teens kind of growth algorithm that benefits from the existing growth on clients, both more deposits, more accounts, market appreciation over time, as well as the new clients and new products. On operating leverage, I mean, we already print over 40% EBITDA margins, which translate to free cash flow at a very high rate. There's ability within our core products to continually get better as we, as David mentioned, take more things in-house, build versus buy, and have better scale on those products. Similarly, what we will do with home lending, if I was here to say that we're going to go from 40% to 70%, I think that would be a little bit of a stretch. We're not a monopoly.
There's definitely ability to improve what is already a fantastic margin that generates a ton of free cash.
I'm afraid I'll leave it there. David, Alan, thank you so much for joining us.
Thanks, Mike.
Thank you.