The Mannheim Centre for Competition and Innovation (MaCCI) supports an author’s workshop on the topic ‘Robo Advice’ that took place at the University of Mannheim on December 10, 2018. The algorithm-controlled investment advice on capital and asset management provided by Robo Advisor is flourishing digital service which has not yet been specifically regulated by the European or German legislator. Starting with a service offering provided by Betterment in the USA in 2010, Robo Advice became swiftly a widely accepted type of personalized and digitized services that have solely in Germany assets worth 2 billion Euros under management.

However, given that the legal framework is still tailored to advisory services provided within the personal contact between service provider and customer, Robo Advisor are provoking a number of complicated legal questions in various fields of law (civil law, banking law, capital market law, data protection law, antitrust law, etc.). The workshop was intended to facilitate the interexchange between practitioners and researches of law who deal with Robo Advisors' services and who also are authors of a legal handbook that will be published by Beck Verlag in autumn 2019. We hoped that the workshop gave productive impetus in terms of regulation, innovation, and softening of trade-offs.