What breakaway advisors experience when they start up with Betterment
A practical guide for breakaway advisors on how to launch the right way—and what to expect when you do.
Going independent is one of the biggest professional decisions an advisor can make. The planning phase—after you've decided but before you've made the move—is where the foundation gets built. The platform you choose, the technology you set up, and the client transition process you design will shape your first year and beyond. For breakaway advisors facing hundreds of tech decisions with limited operational experience, the goal is to find a foundation that doesn't require you to stitch tools together—and a custodial partner invested in your success from day one.
With Betterment Advisor Solutions, advisors don't just get infrastructure—they get a partner that brings dedicated service and support and built-in tax optimization to every client interaction, from the moment of onboarding through every growth phase ahead.
We sat down with our Platform Solutions team to find out what it’s really like to transition to Betterment.
What does the onboarding process look like when you first join Betterment Advisor Solutions, and how long does it take to get up and running?
We can have a new firm set up in about 15 minutes. Once an advisor signs up, and we review their ADV and filings, the account will be activated and they can log in.
Setting up an account involves a few steps: The advisor uploads their business logo, gets their agreements in place, sets up billing preferences, and starts building their firm’s custom portfolios (if desired). With a bit of planning, a firm-specific setup could happen in an hour. For advisors who have just completed registration and are racing to onboard their first clients, that speed is meaningful. You're not waiting weeks to get operational.
How does Betterment support the client transition process, from account opening to ACATS transfers?
The transition process is one of the things I'd highlight as a real differentiator with Betterment. Everything is digital. For many advisors, that alone is a departure from the paper-heavy processes they're used to.
Account opening takes just a few minutes, and we have a paperless ACATS workflow that makes moving assets over pretty straightforward. The platform supports a wide range of ETFs, mutual funds, and stocks. Our team will help create a custom migration plan based on the portfolio strategies you plan to use for your client.
What I think advisors really appreciate is what happens after the assets land. You choose a tax-aware migration strategy and set a gains allowance for each client, and the system transitions accounts accordingly. Smart tax lot selection is embedded in automated rebalancing transactions, so it avoids short-term capital gains and only triggers long-term gains up to the budget you’ve set.
Before anything gets sent to the client, you get a full review. At that point, you can update settings, check the transfer details, and only then send the request over. You're always in control of what goes out, and it’s all completely digital and easy for the client to authorize with a few clicks.
The same logic applies when you're updating a portfolio strategy on an existing goal. You can review and edit rebalancing settings the same way.
What does day-to-day practice management look like on the platform once you're live with clients?
Once you're live, day-to-day management all runs through Co-Pilot, which is essentially your command center for tracking client activity and anything that needs your attention, all in one place. The experience is fully digital and vertically-integrated, so you're not bouncing between systems. You can act on individual accounts or work in bulk with scaled tools, depending on what the day calls for.
The biggest difference with Betterment is automation. When you're building a firm from scratch, often with a lean team, automation isn't just nice to have. It's what makes the economics of a new independent practice actually work.
Say a client calls and wants to put $5,000 into their IRA. Instead of your team needing to log in and invest the cash by manually buying securities, the deposit is automatically invested according to the portfolio strategy and allocation you’ve selected for the client. Fee calculations, account rebalancing, the ongoing maintenance work—it's all handled. But the key is that it’s flexible. You can customize the automation, break things into manual processes when you want more control, or turn it off entirely. It's really the best of both worlds.
How does automated rebalancing work, and how much time does it save advisors on portfolio maintenance?
Automated rebalancing is one piece of a broader suite of tax-smart portfolio management tools that all work together behind the scenes. Betterment offers both reactive rebalancing (using deposits, withdrawals, and dividend reinvestments to minimize drift) and proactive rebalancing (based on drift triggers you can customize as needed). It even handles complex situations like concentrated stock positions or inherited portfolios. Multiply that across a full book of clients, and the time savings—plus the after-tax performance impact—are significant.
For a firm without a large operations team, this is the infrastructure that lets you manage a full book of clients without proportional headcount.
What does the tax-smart transition process look like from the advisor's perspective, and how do you communicate it to clients?
From the advisor side, you're never doing this alone—you have a dedicated Platform Solutions manager guiding the transition, plus relationship management and customer support as backup. The tax-smart tooling itself is comprehensive, and included with the platform fee: tax-loss harvesting, asset location, smart tax lot selection, gains allowances, sell-only substitutes, and rebalancing, all working together. This isn't a bolt-on feature set—tax-efficient investing has been part of how Betterment was built from the beginning, which means advisors can deliver genuinely personalized, tax-aware advice at scale. On the client communication side, we've found that clients who receive clear, thoughtful comms ahead of a transition are rarely upset by the process. They actually appreciate it. We give advisors the resources to make that easy: onboarding videos, communication templates, and plenty of lead time to address questions before they come up. When clients see how carefully the transition has been planned, it builds trust right from the start.
What level of human support is available to advisors, and how quickly can you reach someone when you need help?
Going independent doesn't mean going it alone. On average, it takes about a minute to answer your call, and under one business hour to answer emails.*
You have a dedicated Platform Solutions manager guiding the transition, plus relationship management and customer support as backup.
How does the platform integrate with the tools advisors are already using, like their CRM, financial planning, and compliance software?
Betterment is a vertically-integrated custodian. Our platform is built to fit into the workflows you already have rather than replace them. Our integrations automatically connect Betterment accounts to your existing CRM, financial planning software, and compliance tools, so client information, investment holdings, and account activity all show up in your dashboards without extra legwork. The great thing about the platform is that it has all you need to launch or transition your existing practice, with the ease and sophistication of Betterment’s technology as the foundation.
What does the client-facing experience look like, and how do clients typically respond to the new experience during a transition?
The client experience is honestly one of Betterment's biggest differentiators for advisors. Betterment was built as a consumer platform first, so the app and web experiences have always been at the forefront of what we do.
Clients can also sign up, link their accounts, and start navigating on their own without needing to call anyone for help, which takes routine onboarding tasks off your team’s plate so they can focus on what clients are really paying for: advice.
As for moving clients onto the platform, the main concerns are usually: how long will this take, and will my clients push back against the change? But we’ve found when advisors communicate clearly and confidently, clients tend to follow their lead.
What does a compliant transition actually require?
A compliant transition typically unfolds over 90 days—reviewing your employer agreement, forming your entity, getting registered, and building out the business infrastructure you need to operate. For a full step-by-step breakdown, see our guide.
*Based on Betterment internal data October 2025 - March 2026.