Company: WLTH
Filing Date: 2025-12-12
Form Type: 424B4
Source: 0001628280-25-056780
Chunk: 209

Company: WEALTHFRONT CORP
Filing Date: 2025-12-12
Form: 424B4
Chunk 209
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 wealth of digital-native generations presents a challenge to the traditional financial platforms due to their notably different preferences and financial priorities than the preceding generations. Digital natives, who are poised to overtake Baby Boomers and Gen X to become the largest and wealthiest generations of all time, are not sufficiently served by legacy platforms.

Industry Conditions Before the Global Financial Crisis of 2007-2009

For decades, most incumbent financial providers have focused on older generations of clients in the wealth preservation phase of their lives. Their products were inaccessible for the population of younger consumers in the wealth accumulation phase of their lives due to high account minimums or inadequately addressed needs due to poor software user experiences. Additionally, incumbent platforms operate business models that prioritize personalized investment management services to clients who prefer relationships with a dedicated, often in-person financial advisor or team. Previous generations view human advisors as a necessity, both as a means to manage investment portfolios, and as relationship managers to dutifully steward them through varying market environments.

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We believe this model of financial management is ill-suited to meet the needs of emerging generations who are currently in, or are entering, the wealth accumulation stages of their financial lives. Legacy personal relationship-based platforms were built to serve the needs of older generations, with a particular set of preferences and goals. As the demand for new financial solutions increased with the emergence of digital-native generations, institutions have failed to innovate. Incumbent financial institutions are simply not designed to support newer generations in their wealth accumulation journeys.

### Paradigm Shift in the Financial Services Industry
We believe that the GFC caused a paradigm shift. Through the economic turmoil of that time, a new generation of investors witnessed the severe economic hardships that were created largely as a result of the incumbent financial system. The new generation that grew up in a post-GFC world witnessed the impact of a failing system on their family and friends, from loss of wealth to housing instability. The GFC became the catalyst that drove younger generations to demand new products, services, and companies, all built on the key principle that they felt was sorely lacking in the incumbent system: trust.

The rapid advance of innovation in internet-based technology platforms in the post-GFC world had dramatic implications across the global economy. From media to transportation, education to manufacturing, and hospitality to healthcare, software and digitization disrupted legacy industries profoundly and rapidly, solving many of the key pain points that historically restrained their growth, particularly among younger consumers. Like these other industries, financial services experienced its own technology