As of today, Acorns Australia has now rebranded to Raiz Invest after announcing its intention to divest from its US parent company back in February.
The Acorns app, which rounds up payments and invests the spare change into ETF portfolios, will now be updated to reflect the Raiz Invest branding, logo and colour scheme. The news comes as Australian asset manager Instreet Investment Limited took a controlling stake in the local arm of Acorns in January this year, however no staffing changes were made to the Acorns team.
“After our recent agreement with Acorns, we felt a new name was an important step forward,” said Raiz Invest managing director George Lucas.
“The change reflects our new autonomy and our ability to move quickly to develop and implement product improvements that are responsive to our customers in the Australian market.
“Whilst our users will not notice any immediate difference to the way the app works, they will start to notice a product that becomes more tailored to their unique needs, with changes based on the feedback they share.”
Acorns’ Australian arm has more than 460,000 registered users since launching in 2016, and manages over AU$150M in assets. The US version of the app has also achieved widespread success, after recently landing backing from U2 frontman Bono’s investment start-up The Rise Fund.
Acorns US now supports over 2.7m accounts after landing an integration with payments giant PayPal in November last year.
Lucas continued: “Whilst our name has changed, our commitment to improving the financial confidence and literacy of Australians remains the same. In the coming months we’ll continue to share improvements and bring new products to market that help our customers save in the background of life.”
