Stephen Chen wants to get financial planning into the hands of 100 million people—and working with advisors will help him achieve that goal.
He has spent the last decade growing his consumer-focused financial planning startup Boldin, formerly NewRetirement. Almost 400,000 consumers have accessed the platform, which provides tools to analyze their financial well-being or build personal financial plans.
In September, the company, which has grown to more than 50 developers and employees, announced its name change “to reflect our hope for our customers: That you can be financially secure enough to be bold in life, whatever that means to you.”
The platform has a variety of offerings, from simple, free, do-it-yourself software for basic financial and retirement planning, to premium services that include access to articles, podcasts, classes, training, and certified financial planners for a fee of fixed low. It presented a snapshot showing a user's financial health as measured by more than 20 metrics.
“There are 33,000 people paying us for planning, which represents $90 billion in total assets—and the average free user of our platform has $1 million in total assets,” he said.
While its direct-to-consumer popularity continues to grow, so does interest from advisors and enterprise platforms, which can access the technology through APIs or as a white-label offering.
Several dozen smaller advisers are already actively using the platform with clients, and one large firm (he couldn't reveal the name) has built more than 2,300 plans representing about $4 billion in total assets.
“The average millennial on our platform with an advisor says they sought formal financial guidance at age 29,” said Chen, who noted that this was nine years earlier than the average Gen X client and 20 years ahead of the rise in the baby.
“That's why the counselor is so important. “For a lot of people, they'll use the platform and build a plan and say to themselves, 'this looks interesting, but I want to get it back from a CFP,'” he said.
Chen, 55, has spent the last decade at Boldin, but before that, he worked in technology for years, including stints with Dimensional Fund Advisors, Charles Schwab, Lloyd's of London and Credit Suisse First Boston, as well as technology firms like HP. and IBM.
Boldini's origin story is a home-grown tale: his mother, worried about being able to retire, came to him and asked for a loan.
Instead, he wanted to understand her finances and get a more holistic view of her retirement needs. He found no easy way to do this, no well-rounded consumer planning application, and few advisers at the time were advertising financial planning services – most wanted to manage assets.
So he set out to develop a solution that would enable anyone to create a plan based on their own resources, values, goals and priorities.
It turns out there's a lot of demand among advisors for the platform, too. Whether that growing army of wealth management users will take it to 100 million individual clients or not remains to be seen.