Robo advisers are rising in popularity, but their usage in still dwarfed by more traditional advice channels, a survey shows.

Four percent of ‘mass affluent’ respondents from analytics firm GlobalData’s 2019 Banking and Payments survey said that robo-advisers were their preferred channel for financial advisers. This was up from 1.3 percent in the 2018 edition of the survey.

An independent financial adviser (26 percent) and ‘an adviser at my main bank’ (13 percent) remained the most popular.

Sergel Woldemichael, a wealth management analyst at GlobalData, said while four percent remained small, it was ...