"Can’t anyone just do it for me?!" : A qualitative study of 10 women’s views on investments and robo-advisory

Abstract: Robo-advisory is a new service in the financial market and is designed to support financial decisions. Previous researches show that attitudes toward robo-advisory are an important aspect of their acceptance, and therefore this study is designed to investigate how the attitudes to robo-advisory is affected by five chosen factors. Previous studies also show a lack of financial literacy in young women leading to poor investment decisions. The purpose of this thesis is therefore to study how the factors influence the attitudes toward robo-advisors from a perspective of a young women in order to see if robo-advisory could be used as a substitute for financial literacy. This qualitative research was conducted on ten young women age​ 20-30. The collected data has then been transcribed, and then analyzed based on a content analysis with categories created for the purpose of the survey. The result shows that without financial literacy or previous use of robo-advisory in their social circle, the perception of risk and trust for robo-advisory is unlikely to change. It also shows that previous bad experience of robot-based systems affect the attitude toward robo-advisory negatively. This research can be useful in the design of robo-advisory and how to shape the service to get this target group to start using it. Because attitudes have a major impact on the use of the service, the results of this survey are a good basis for companies to relate to.