Hong Kong robo-advisor welcome offers: StashAway fee-free months vs Endowus HK$300 fee credit

Hong Kong robo-advisors and managed fund platforms rarely pay cash welcome bonuses. Instead they cut your platform fees, either by waiving the management fee for a period or by giving you a fee credit. How much you actually save depends on how much you invest and the platform's fee rate.

Below we compare the StashAway and Endowus Hong Kong referral programmes. Both firms are licensed by the SFC. We list only terms we could check on official pages.

The StashAway pricing page says that when you invite a friend, you each get a six-month management fee waiver covering up to HK$50,000 of your portfolios. The referral page adds that your friend must sign up through the referral link and fund the account within 30 days for both of you to qualify.

StashAway's management fee is 0.2% to 0.8% a year, falling as your assets grow. There's no minimum investment and no account setup or exit fee. As a rough guide, at the top rate of 0.8%, six months of fees on HK$50,000 come to about HK$200. What you actually save depends on your fee tier and how much you invest.

Under the Endowus invite page terms, the referee must open a new individual account with the promo code and invest at least HK$10,000 or US$1,300 in total in the same currency before it counts as a successful referral. Uninvested cash in the account doesn't count. Referees must not have held any Endowus account, product or service in their sole or joint name before. Each person can use only one promo code, and the offer is for Hong Kong residents only.

The HK$300 is an Endowus fee credit. It can't be transferred or exchanged for cash, and it isn't paid out in any other form if you withdraw. By default the credit is issued in Hong Kong dollars and applies to HKD investments; for clients who invest only in US dollars, Endowus nets the USD-equivalent amount off the quarterly fee. The Endowus pricing page lists 0.25% to 0.60% a year for general strategies and 0.10% for cash management. At 0.60% on HK$10,000, a year's fees come to about HK$60, so the HK$300 credit takes several years to use up.

We list only platforms whose referral terms and our referral code we could confirm on official pages this time. Syfe Hong Kong's referral page didn't confirm our code this time, so it's left out for now. We'll add it once we can verify it.