Learning about the typical information required to open investment accounts

With most Robo-advisors, you will be required to create a user account before you can access any other features, including those from previous chapters. Typically, that may only necessitate sharing an email address and creating a password. This email address may be validated with a one-time code to ensure it is valid, as fake email addresses would be a problem for a financially regulated platform.

By the time you reach the actual account opening phase, we are talking about opening a custodial account at the custodian, not a user in your Robo-advisor database. You will need to link the two once the account has been created. What type of information is needed from the investor is going to be largely dictated by the custodian. The information will be sent to the custodian either via batch file transfer or an API if they offer it.

Note

Before you can access such account-opening APIs, you will need to register...