StashAway Referral Programme as an incentive

I have mentioned in my previous posts about setting up StashAway and Smartly Singapore robo-advisor accounts for my wife. But I didn’t set any up for myself. My plan was to be a spectator and just monitor how those accounts performed. It was tempting to set one up for myself just so that I don’t feel left out by our venture into FinTech personal investment management.

Then my wife received an email about the StashAway Referral Programme. It makes sense for these relatively new robo-advisors to offer referral incentives to encourage more customers to sign up and open accounts with them. After all, it’s essential they capture as much market share as possible since new entrants may eventually come in to compete with them.

By the way, this is not a sponsored post. I’m not going to even provide my wife’s StashAway referral link in this post or on my Resources blogpage. But it’s always fun to have a closer look at a Referral Programme since we only get to participate in a few of them such as Uber and Grab.

For the StashAway Referral Programme, this is how it works for my wife. For every friend she refers and who funds their account by at least S$1, both of them are entitled to a 6 month platform fee waiver for up to S$10,000 of Assets Under Management (AUM). If a 2nd friend is referred, it goes up to S$20,000 of AUM for my wife. There’s no limit on the number of referrals.

This is a decent starter Referral Program by StashAway but it definitely has room for improvement. My wife only has less than S$1,000 in her StashAway account that is still expected to be less than S$10,000 in 6 months time. Hence, there’s no incentive for her to referral multiple friends. In fact, one friend is sufficient and that’s me! So I used her referral link to sign myself up and open a StashAway account with S$100 initial deposit and S$100 monthly transfer.

The fee savings tipped me over the edge but wasn’t actually the main reason behind me opening the account. I have always been a big supporter of retail consumer FinTech developments and believe that the growth of viable savings and investments alternatives should be encouraged. I know the most efficient approach is to contribute the additional S$100 to my wife’s StashAway account to achieve lower fees sooner. But it’s a small monthly amount and I’m willing to accept the higher costs as a show of support. More importantly, I’m interested to see what Smartly’s response will be!