Can robots manage your money better than you?

“Unfortunately, humans are expensive,” Sha says. “They can be prone to bias, based on how they get paid or how much they get paid.”

Many personal financial advisers are paid more depending on the stocks or investments you, the client, buy. Conflicts of interest riddle the industry. And there are other problems with humans, too.

“They don’t scale well, so a person who is trying to manage money for a couple hundred people, they can’t look at everyone’s account all the time,” Sha says. “So … if you could replace that human with a machine — which has been done in a lot of other industries to great success — you really can build a better, more scalable, lower-cost solution.”

SigFig charges a flat fee of $10 a month, not a percentage of the money it manages or a new fee for each transaction.