New frontiers in financial advisory: challenges and opportunities in roboadvisory services

The embedment of digital technology within the architecture of the global financial system has substantially altered, over the past thirty years, the structure, accessibility, and dynamics of financial services. It is only in these transformed settings that “FinTech”—a contraction of “financial technology”—can rightly be described as holding great promise and much complexity for a 21st-century financial ecosystem. It is here that we position ourselves to understand FinTech not simply as a fad, but rather more critically as an integral part of reconfiguring the relationship between finance and innovation disruption to traditional banking models, also catalysing meaningful conversations about regulation, ethics, inclusion, and systemic risk. This thesis will undertake a detailed examination of the evolution, classification, and regulatory implications in Europe and the United States, centring on how the 2008 financial crisis can be best understood as serving equally well as an imagined watershed moment, ushering in a new era of decentralised, technology-driven financial services.