Swell Investing Closes its Doors

Swell Investing Closes its Doors

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Another one bites the dust!

Sadly, Swell Investing has closed its doors and ceased all operations as of July 24, 2019.

Why?

According to their website, Swell wasn’t able to reach the scale required to remain a viable business. In other words, they just weren’t popular enough.

This comes as no surprise; as larger robo advisors like Wealthsimple, Betterment, and Wealthfront offer new features that smaller robos like Swell aren’t able to provide, they take market share away from the smaller players.

Swell Investing, in this case, focused solely on Impact Investing. Even though they offered a unique approach and more flexibility within the SRI space itself, other robo advisors like Wealthsimple have simple come in and offered socially-responsible investing portfolios. Since you also have more flexibility within Wealthsimple’s platform, it’s no surprise that investors decided to stick with the bigger and more established platforms.

I’m an investor – what happens with my money?

Fortunately, Swell Investing isn’t a take-your-money-and-run kind of company.

Existing investors have two options:

  1. Withdrawal your money into your linked bank account. Swell will be covering all transfer fees, as well as providing free management of any left over funds for the month of August.
  2. Transfer your money into another investment platform of your choice. This is known as an Automated Customer Account Transfer (ACAT).

If you sit on it and do nothing, Swell will take the typical route of giving Folio Investments control, who will sell your holdings and either deposit your funds to the bank account on file, or send you a check in the mail.

What Next?

Emperor Investments is offering free management of your Swell Portfolio if you transfer your account to them by August 15th. They will keep the exact same holdings you had with Swell, and they will not sell your securities. Even though they don’t offer their own SRI portfolios yet (they’re working on it), they’ll manage the same portfolio you had with Swell, for free. Check out that offer over here.

If you’re looking for a new robo advisor focused on socially-responsible investing, we recommend Wealthsimple. To find some other SRI robo advisors, head over to our Impact Investing page.

We wish the Swell Investing team all the best; it was a pleasure working with them.

Disclaimer: Investing involves risk. Stock prices fluctuate, the market dips and peaks, and interest rates fluctuate wildly. Past performance is no guarantee of future results. The opinions expressed on this page are exactly that: opinions, and should not be taken as investment advice. There are potential risks with any investment strategy.