It’s no coincidence that Merrill Lynch launched its new robo platform the same week it decided to exclude commission based product from IRAs. Likewise, the decision by Wells Fargo to announce a robo partnership with SigFig suggests that despite the pronouncements of pundits and industry lobbyists, DOL is hardly DOA.

It takes a brave man to guess how the Trump administration will balance populist tendencies with free market rhetoric. In this case, as I note in a previous post, the inauguration of the new president precedes DoL implementation by less than three months. The regulatory ship has left port, and in any event, it's not clear that President Trump will want to spend valuable political capital undoing DoL.

I’ll discuss Wells Fargo’s motivations in a later post. For now, I’ll note the degree to which a robo offer aligns well with the principles of transparency, low cost and accessibility at the heart of DoL. At the same time, I caution the reader to consider the challenges that any bank faces in rolling out a robo platform, a few of which I underscore in this column by Financial Planning’s Suleman Din.