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In this episode, we are talking personal financial management, but with a human twist. Sam Lewis is the CEO and Founder of Fruitful, a fintech company reimagining financial advice for millennials and Gen Z. Fruitful offers a $98 monthly membership that combines certified financial planners (actual humans) with AI-powered technology to create personalized “money systems” that automatically allocate incoming funds across bills, spending, and goals. Lewis discusses his background at Mastercard and how he witnessed traditional banks underserving younger customers, leading him to launch Fruitful in 2023.
The conversation explores Fruitful’s unique approach of maintaining human advisors rather than going fully AI-driven, their focus on “income allocation” over “asset allocation,” and their transparent pricing model that forgoes hidden fees and even interchange revenue. Lewis explains how the platform serves mass affluent members who want to automate their financial lives while maintaining the human touch for trust and emotional connection in money management decisions.
In this podcast you will learn:
- The big gap that Sam saw when it comes to financial advice.
- The core product offering of Fruitful and what people get for $98/month.
- How their Certified Financial Planners (CFP) help their members build a money system.
- The suite of financial products that is included.
- Who they are working with on the banking side and why it is such an important relationship.
- Why they decided to have a human in the loop to help guide people through this.
- How Sam thinks about AI and its role in helping their members.
- What happens after the money system is set up.
- Who comes to Fruitful for help and what they are looking for.
- How they are getting new customers in the door.
- How they help their members with their investments.
- Why they have decided not pursue any other revenue streams beyond the monthly fee.
- How Sam is thinking about adding complementary financial products.
- What they are focused on for the next 12-18 months.
Read a transcription of our conversation below.
FINTECH ONE-ON-ONE PODCAST NO. 542 – SAM LEWIS
Sam Lewis: First, we’re using and building a ton of technology in the backend and leveraging AI to scale the things that can be automated. But when it comes to someone managing their money, it’s one of those last taboo topics that’s out there. It’s one where for someone, for a person thinking about making a decision with their financial life, I don’t think we’re at a point where someone’s doing that with a chatbot. Having a human in the loop really builds that emotional connection and builds that trust. And that’s what we’re seeing from our members, and I believe we are going to see even more from Gen Z and millennials, who are looking for that one-on-one support. The way we think about AI and automation in managing your money is we’re able to enable our team of guides, certified financial planners, where things that used to take four hours to manually put together, we can get that down to three minutes.
Peter Renton: This is the Fintech One-on-One Podcast, the show for fintech enthusiasts looking to better understand the leaders shaping fintech and banking today. My name is Peter Renton and since 2013 I’ve been conducting in-depth interviews with fintech founders and banking executives. Today on the show, I am delighted to welcome Sam Lewis, CEO and Founder of Fruitful, a fintech company that’s reimagining financial advice for millennials and Gen Z. Now, Fruitful offers a $98 monthly membership that combines humans, certified financial planners, with AI-powered technology to create personalized, what they call money systems that automatically allocate incoming funds across bills, spending and goals. In the age of AI for everything, Fruitful relies on humans as a central part of the value proposition, betting that people are not yet willing to give away the keys to their financial kingdom to an AI bot. Now let’s get on with the show.
PR: Welcome to the podcast, Sam.
SL: Great to be here, thanks for having me on.
PR: My pleasure. So let’s kick it off by giving listeners a little bit of background about yourself. You’ve got some interesting experience in your work history. Give us some of the highlights, if you would.
SL: Yeah, absolutely. Started my career at a data and analytics startup called APT. Works with regional and national banks, retailers like Target, restaurants like McDonald’s, helping them make better use of their data to drive decisions. We got acquired by MasterCard in 2015, did a five-plus year stay at MasterCard, ended up leading that product. Worked really closely with big banks like Citi, USAA, Capital One, a bunch of others. And that helped me get up close and personal of just seeing how customers are underserved by traditional financial institutions. So take a lot of the big banks, right? You can have a checking account and a credit card. And those two things just don’t talk to each other. And that, and those business lines internally, are competing with each other. They’re making money in different ways. And it just really opened my mind seeing there was no real incentive to innovate or truly try to consider a customer’s needs for people who were not really high earners.
PR: Right. Sure. So was that sort of the germination, the seed, shall we say, to start Fruitful was seeing how those sorts of people just had no options with these larger banks.
SL: Well, yeah, one of many of the seeds, you know, it’s really seeing that younger people, you know, Gen Z, millennials, there’s not a lot of access in financial services, whether it’s big banks, traditional registered investment advisors, fintechs and neo banks, or on social media, Instagram and TikTok. There’s a whole lot of stuff being thrown at people, whether it’s “Here’s this financial product, here’s this advice about what to do.” And there’s just so much stress and anxiety for people around, “What do I do with my money? When my money comes in each month, what happens?” And where we saw there was a big gap is all of those things lacked one thing. There’s no action. You can get a lot of advice. You can get a lot of tips about what to do. You can get financial products, you can get all these different things. There’s very little action. And that’s a big part of what we’re trying to do is connect that advice to taking action.
PR: Right. Interesting. My previous podcast that I did with the founder of Core Innovation Capital VC firm, he said almost the exact same thing there.
SL: It’s an important one.
PR: People need help taking action. That’s, that’s very true. So, okay. So tell us then what did you launch with? What’s the suite of products today?
SL: Yeah, absolutely. So we are reimagining what it means to have financial advice and to manage your money. We have launched a $98 monthly membership back in the middle of 2023. We’ve raised $37 million to date. We’ve got thousands of members across all 50 states. We are working to help people in their 20s, 30s, and 40s, as we mentioned, take action on their finances. And so what you get from Fruitful in this membership is, compared to traditional advisory services, things that can be more antiquated, less tech-forward. We’re trying to bring a personability to it, bring technology to it and make it all around connecting that advice to action.
PR: Okay, so what does that look like in practice? If someone’s got a membership at Fruitful, what does that actually get them?
SL: Absolutely. First and foremost, it’s a money system. That’s what we think people are looking for in their lives is a, “When my money’s coming in, what happens to it?” That’s what’s really driving a lot of stress and anxiety around personal finance is it’s the “just what’s going on?” I can get things from PFM tools. That’s just going to give you awareness around where you’ve spent your money to give you more stress around how you’re doing it. But what we do is solve that by not just giving someone a budget, we’re giving them a money system. So when someone signs up for Fruitful, this is what happens all within their first week: They choose a guide to work with. That’s what we call our certified financial planners. And then within a week, that guide will work with them to build a money system that very clearly breaks down their bills, what are their musts that they have each month, things like rent, your internet, your cell phone, all of the bills that you can automate. Your spend, so what is free to spend each month? What can you just go out to dinner with your friends and not have to think about, “Where’s my money going? How expensive is this?” You just know, here’s my number that I can be spending and I don’t need to be line-item budgeting to be stressing about the $8 cup of coffee. And then the third part of that map is your goals. So how does that all translate down into my short, medium and long-term goals? So things like, building up an emergency fund or I want to save for a trip to Europe, or I want to be saving for kids to go to college. And so, the first part is laying all of that out in a very clear map and making that visual super clear to our members. And then the secret sauce is in the action. It’s implementing that. Our members click one button that opens up all of the accounts that they need to implement that money system. And then as they bring in their direct deposit into Fruitful, it automatically disperses the funds into those accounts based on the logic and map you’ve built with your guide. So from day one to day seven, you’ve now got your financial home built and ready to go.
PR: And so what are the different accounts then? I mean, obviously you’ve got some kind of checking account that is the core operating account where the money, the direct deposit goes in, but what else is there?
SL: The most important thing to us that we’ve seen as what has struggled in other, you know, in PFM tools in other fintechs and banks when trying to look at this mass affluent market, is not having control over the rails. And so for us, all of those places where our members are holding their cash, in a cash account, spending, so we have a charge card attached to that cash account where you’re getting 2% cash back on everything you’re spending, and then your investments, at no additional fee. So, owning the rails of where the money is actually moving, is being spent, is being saved, that’s incredibly important to us, incredibly important to our members so that it gives them the ability to actually take action and not just, “Oh, here’s an idea of what you can do. Now you’re on your own, go try to implement it.” We want to make it as easy as possible by giving them all of these tools and the accounts to do it.
PR: Right. Okay. So I want to talk about the backend here, because I think that’s going to be interesting for a lot of the listeners. I’ve seen you working with Synctera it looks like, Emprise Bank, it looks like. Maybe tell us who is working and how you are working with financial institutions on the backend?
SL: Yeah, absolutely. We were incubated within our sponsor bank, Emigrant Bank, and that’s a huge piece of what we are doing because it enables us to build really innovative and differentiated products, do so in a way that benefits our customers, but also does so in a really compliant way. If we were to work with — they’re one of our biggest investors; if we were to do that and try to build the types of products we’re building with any other sponsor bank, it’d be really hard to get the level of attention and engagement to build these products together. And so that relationship is core to what we’re doing. I think it will be a big piece of where fintech is going is that fintech and sponsor bank relationship needs to be really close for compliance, but also to build innovative products. And then Synctera sits between us as a close partner of ours, enables us to build that innovative technology directly on that bank.
PR: Right. And is the invest and save piece, is that all flowing through Emigrant Bank as well?
SL: So the banking products are with Emigrant and then we work with Apex on our investment product.
PR: Apex. Gotcha, gotcha. Okay, that makes sense. So then, the big question here is the human involvement because, I would have said if this was an AI-based system with, you know, AI agents that look like humans, the scaling of that is limitless, right? And I’m sure you thought deeply about this because you’ve introduced humans, which are not as scalable as AI agents. Why did you decide that you needed a human to help guide people through this?
SL: First, we’re using and building a ton of technology in the backend and leveraging AI to scale the things that can be automated. But when it comes to someone managing their money, it’s one of those last taboo topics that’s out there. It’s one where, for someone, for a person thinking about making a decision with their financial life, I don’t think we’re at a point where someone’s doing that with a chatbot. Having a human in the loop really builds that emotional connection and builds that trust. And that’s what we’re seeing from our members, and I believe are going to see even more from Gen Z and millennials who are looking for that one-on-one support. The way we think about AI and automation in managing your money, is we’re able to enable our team of our guides, certified financial planners, where things that used to take four hours to manually put together, we can get that down to three minutes. And traditional financial registered investment advisors, the technology in that industry is way behind.
PR: I know; it’s horrible.
SL: Yeah. And I think there’s just so much room for change there. It gets tossed around sometimes, all financial advisors will be out of a job in a few months. I think that’s way overblown. But this industry is ripe for leveraging tech in a smarter way. And you leverage that tech to scale and automate where you don’t need the human touch. And then you double down on the areas that do, which is getting that trust and that buy-in. And for us, getting someone to buy into that money system, that’s the moment to do it.
PR: Interesting. I could see that. I’m thinking of my own situation. I have a financial advisor. She manages about a third of our total portfolio. The main reason I have it is that I am very financially literate, I’ve been a self-directed investor for 30-plus years, but my wife is not. And if something happened to me, and I’ve got very esoteric investments, let me tell you, some stuff that would take hours to explain to someone. But my financial advisor knows that if something happens to me, she can slowly get out of all of my esoteric stuff, put it in traditional stuff, which my wife would be able to, she would help manage that. And it’s a human. And I wouldn’t be prepared to have an AI do that. And I’m very, very comfortable with AI in most situations, but I can see where you’re coming from. But I’m curious if you’ve thought about having like a low-end subscription that’s 10 bucks a month, that’s a hundred percent AI. I mean, is that sort of something, or do you really feel like the humans is the most important piece?
SL: I think our options will evolve and we’ll look at where things are going. But ultimately, in our back end, we have many different AI agents managing and bringing and making us more efficient. I think if you went out to the vast majority of folks who are Gen Z and millennial, outside of our fintech bubble and then outside of the tech bubble and you said, “Hey, do you know what an AI agent is? They’re going to manage your money.” The most common response would be like, “What are you talking about?” Really for us, it comes down to, people want to spend, we want to get people able to do anything else. We don’t want them spending the time stressing about their money. We want to get people able to go outside, go do things, go spend the rest of their life. And I think AI is going to be a huge part of that. And that’s what we’re building, is that AI financial home. But being able to do that with the human touch and human face is what makes that very sticky. It hits on the emotional piece that I think a lot of people need. That human in the loop piece will be a huge part of that evolution.
PR: Right, right. But it may not be permanent, right? There may be, in five or 10 years’ time, we may have Gen Xers and millennials that are comfortable having an AI agent because they’re having an AI agent run other parts of their life, and they may be comfortable. I presume, or you are open, shall we say, to if the customers demand it, you will, I presume, you will say, “Right, we’ll have an AI agent option.” Right?
SL: I think I’d look at your example of your investments, right? Where you say, yeah, this stuff is complex. Would I trust an AI to do that yet? I don’t think so. I think the same thing for a person who might say, “I’m very open to trusting an AI agent to go repurchase my groceries when I need it, or even plan and book a trip for me.” But to buy a house for me and deal with all the pieces in between, it gets really complex. I think we’re going to get there and we’re going, we are actively at, you know, we’re at the forefront of doing that as a way people think about managing their money through AI. But I think it’s going to be much more of a fusion between the two. And you look at the highest end of, you know, high earners and folks they want, that human touch is going to be a part of that premium. You want to automate away the things that you can and then the human touch is still going to be important.
PR: Right, so from what you’re saying, this could be another decade or two before the human touch is less popular, shall we say.
SL: I think AI will continue to do more and more, but I think the human touch piece is actually, can be, it’s part of being premium. I think it’s going to be, it’s part of a higher tier and level of service that we’re going to want and expect. And I think it will continue to fuse and merge to be just an even better service for both Fruitful members and society writ large.
PR: So I want to talk about these certified financial planners that you have. And obviously, there’s a lot of work that goes into creating the initial plan. I’m sure they’ll have a phone conversation, they’ll have a Zoom conversation, or whatever. Then you said they set up the plan. You’ve got a lot of AI in the background helping you do that. But what happens after the first week?
SL: After the first week it’s about implementing and maintaining your money system, and then evolving it over time. So, getting that first piece of, someone gets over the hump of, “Hey my financial life is really stressing me out. I’m ready to do something about it.” That’s a huge point to get someone to in the first place. Being able to get that money system in place really fast captures that moment and gets someone to the point of, “All right, I feel so much better about this. I feel an instant stress release. My financial life is on track.” And then people evolve. You know, six months from then, I’ve seen members come in because they want to merge finances with their partner. And then six months from then, they’re getting married. And then a year after that, they’re having their first kid. People’s financial lives change, and we grow with them. And that’s where being a membership is incredibly important as well, because you’re building that relationship. We are not only their financial home, where their accounts are, their direct deposits coming in, they’re having their investments, we’re able to automate their bills and their spend, but also evolve that money system with them where they are in life and as they continue to grow.
PR: And so, how much, the $98 a month, does that get you, like a monthly check-in with the human, or what does that actually get you?
SL: When we think about pricing, and a big reason why we are a membership is millennials and Gen Z increasingly are looking for trust, transparency, and being genuine. And so when you go to Fruitful’s website, you immediately see this is $98 a month, and this is exactly what you get. It’s very different from traditional financial advisories where people are clipping 2% fees, and you don’t really know about it, or you have to go deep into someone’s regulatory filings to understand what you’re going to be charged. That’s a really icky feeling. That doesn’t give me a ton of trust in how that person is going to, they’re going be managing my whole financial life, which is basically my entire life. And you’re starting it off that way? We want to start it off with trust, and being genuine, and transparency. And so our membership gets you everything. It’s access to your guide, no fees on your investments, all are Fruitful’s financial products. We want that just to be straightforward and transparent.
PR: What if the person wants to have a weekly conversation with their certified financial planner? I mean, do you put limits on it?
SL: The way we approach building our money systems means that that’s not something that needs to happen. Really folks don’t want to spend a ton of time talking about this. When our members come in, it’s actually, “I want to talk about my money less. Can you build me this money system and help me here so that I can get back to doing anything else?” Our members range all across the spectrum from extremely busy in their job, busy personal lives. This is something where, if they can automate this big piece and relieve the stress and anxiety from it, it gives them so much time to go back and do anything else. So it’s much more about what we’re able to do is automate all those pieces and make them feel so much better about it versus, I want to come in and talk about my money all the time.
PR: Right. Gotcha. Okay. That makes sense. So then, I want to talk about the clients that you have, because you know, $98 a month, it’s really cheap, or it’s really inexpensive, I should say, when it comes to, you know, comparing it with a lot of the financial advisors, like my financial advisor is not anywhere close to that sort of pricing. So you’ve got people that are probably doing a little better than living paycheck to paycheck, but they’re not millionaires yet, shall we say. I’d love to get a sense of what’s the median amount, like dollars of assets that your customers have and like, do you know their income? I mean, I imagine you do because you’ve got access to their direct deposit, but give us some more color about the people coming to Fruitful.
SL: Our down-the-middle member is someone in their 20s, 30s, or 40s and making 150k a year who comes to us and says, “Hey, I’m making, you know, six figures at this point in my career. I thought this would be a whole lot easier. This is what I was told my whole life was like, work really hard and get to this point and this stuff still really hard.” And what we’ve seen is a lot of things out there focus on assets and asset allocation. It’s always about, let’s get you, you want to improve your financial life. You got to invest like a rich person. We want to get you into alts, we’re going get you into crypto. We want to get you into, uh, um, into …
PR: Gold.
SL: Into gold. All of these things that, those things are sexy, right? They grab your attention, but what we’ve really seen where people need help, is on income allocation. It’s “My money comes in each month, what happens to it?” And that is not just for folks who are making 50, 75, 80K a year. We’re talking our range of members of people making 100K, 200K, 500K a year. And they need to be thinking more about “Where’s my income going every single month as it comes in?” And that’s where we’ve really focused on that breakdown of bills you’re free to spend each month and tracking for your goals because that’s the point that’s been driving a lot of stress and that’s where we are able to differentiate. On the investments and asset side, absolutely, we are building really innovative things, but the key problem that we think we’re solving that others aren’t focusing on is that income allocation versus asset allocation.
PR: Yep. Okay. That makes sense. So, like any consumer-facing fintech, the big question is, how do you acquire customers? Because that’s, I mean, thankfully, you’ve got a decent amount of revenue coming in when you have a paying customer. You’re not relying on interchange or just interchange. So maybe tell us a little bit about your approach there in getting new customers in the door.
SL: One of the biggest ways we grow is through referrals; our members referring each other. We’ve had many members who have referred many people in their family, their entire friend group, because they work with Fruitful and they say, “This is awesome. This just gave me so much time back. I’ve shifted my entire financial life over here. My direct deposit goes into Fruitful, and things just happen like magic. You have to do this too.” Because when people are stressed about their personal finances there usually talking about it with their friends or with their family.
PR: Right.
SL: And we really, you know, have been able to capitalize referrals doing even more there and you know we also look in digital channels and Instagram, Google and others, I think those are really big for meeting are our market where they are, but ultimately for us the referral method is going to be huge.
PR: Right. So you’re talking about income allocation like on the investment side, because I think if you’re making $150,000 a year, you’re probably thinking, “Well, I should be investing some of this money.” I love the whole idea of a money system; I think it’s great. And I think everyone should be proactive and, you know, be thoughtful about what happens when their direct deposit comes in rather than just saying, “Oh my God, I got $50 left at the end of the month. That sucks”. But putting away stuff for investment, I mean, you said you’re working with Apex. How big of a deal is that for people? You said the income allocation is more important than the asset allocation, but the asset allocation is still going to be, I imagine, it’s not unimportant.
SL: Yeah, it’s huge.
PR: So how do you approach that?
SL: That’s the big part of the goals part, right? If we think about the world as your bills, your spend, your goals, a lot of those goals you’re investing towards. And our approach on investments is keeping it straightforward. Oftentimes, you know, our down the middle member, you know, we have many people coming in who have hundreds of thousands in investments that they roll over into Fruitful. We have some people who are at the very early stages of their investment journey. And we build tailored portfolios for our members to get them into the right things they need to do for their investments, and just try to make that very easy. But also a big part of investing for our members is we’re tying it to their goals, right? And being able to give them a clear sense of, not only here’s where you’re looking at for retirement, but if we’re saving up for a house, why are we building? What are we contributing? What is the target date for when this is going to come in so that we can really not just have investments out there, and it’s great to see the numbers grow. But our members are also looking for how are my investments gonna contribute to the specific goals that I have now and will have in the future. So that’s a big part of how we bring that income and those assets together.
PR: Gotcha, gotcha. Okay. And so what about like revenue for you beyond the monthly subscription, which I imagine is the vast majority, but I presume you’re getting some interchange. You’ve said the 2% cashback card. Are you getting any revenue from the investment side of the house? What are the revenue streams coming into Fruitful?
SL: A big part of keeping that trust, transparency, and being genuine is why we’re a membership and why it’s a flat fee. This is what you pay. We’re not taking any on the cash that our members have at Fruitful. There’s no spread revenue. We’re not taking money on that. And they have their work, giving that all back. We’re not taking revenue on their interchange, giving that back in terms of the rewards. No fees on their investments. We want to just make this straightforward and simple. And I think that’s where a lot of the industry has gotten way too complex for the consumer is, “What the hell am I paying for this thing?” And we make it hard on ourselves, right? By putting that upfront, here is what you’re paying and here is what you’re getting. But ultimately, we’re doing that to provide the best possible product for our members. And we are keeping our members for great reasons, not trying to hide the fees and hide what they’re paying. We want this to be, “You’re a Fruitful member because this makes your life easy, or your financial home, and you love it,” and not because, “Oh, there are some fees back there and I don’t understand where they’re going.”
PR: Interesting. The interchange is surprising to me. I thought you’d at least keep a little bit of that because when people are running their whole financial life, you can get significant interchange. Chime, who just went public, we now know all about their financials and the amount of interchange that they’re getting. It’s dramatic how much interchange revenue, when you have that sort of scale, you can generate. So what you’ve said is you’re focusing really purely on the membership income. And I get that that is a great thing for trust with your customers. I can see how that’s going to be a great sort of way to build up goodwill with your customers.
SL: We think that great product trust is what people are looking for in their financial home. And we want to flip how this has been done forever entirely on its head. From the 2 % hidden fees on all of your investments to I’m being cross-sold products that I’m being told to get, and I don’t know that someone’s getting a kickback for it. I think that’s upside down. We want to make it much more on the side of our member.
PR: Okay, so the obvious question though is, you’re providing a certain number of financial services for your clients. Clearly they have needs outside of what you’re providing. For example, if they’re gonna wanna buy a car, you can help them with the deposit, with the money down, but then they’re gonna need a loan or a lease or something, then they might wanna buy a house or they might wanna redo their kitchen and get a personal loan or a home equity loan. All types of different loans, I’m only talking about lending products. That to me seems a logical complement to what you’re doing. How do you view it?
SL: We are looking to get really, really good at what we do now. I think the sky’s the limit beyond that. Our members, they don’t need to have their assets at Fruitful. They don’t need to have every single thing there. We think to be your financial home, it’s about having your direct deposit and being your money system. As you look at other products around car loans, student loans, all these things, we are able to advise our members on these things. I think down the line, is there opportunity to expand in what we’re doing? Absolutely. And that’s where you really build on that trust and build on that money system. But for now, we’re getting really, really good at being that financial home and money system.
PR: Okay, so then as you look out over the next 12 to 18 months, what are you focused on?
SL: We are, at its core trying to change how generations of people think and interact with the financial services industry and with their own money. And that’s a pretty big problem to solve. And we think we have made a ton of headway on it. I’m trying to make this much more straightforward, make this much more transparent, make this much more built on trust. So, scaling what we’re doing. I’m continuing to really iterate on our technology so we can help more and more members. And then we’re also looking at, you know, in a lot of the industry folks who are trying to help out the mass affluence space, they’ll see, this is really hard. Let’s make something more expensive and help fewer people. We want to go the other way. We’re going to be looking at how we can bring down our price. How can we help more and more people so that ultimately we can be the most affordable way to take action on your money?
PR: All right. That’s a good place to end it. Sam, really appreciate you coming on the show. What an interesting company you have built and best of luck to you.
SL: Thank you so much, thanks for having me.
PR: Okay, see ya.
I must admit that I was skeptical going into this interview, that the fixed cost of a human providing financial advice would be a bad business idea. But after chatting with Sam, I’ve changed my perspective a little. I think the big reason, that we did touch on in the interview, is the action piece, turning advice into action. This is the missing piece at so many fintech companies and Fruitful is attacking this with the human touch.
As technology gets more and more dominated by AI agents, there may be a sustainable role for the human in the loop in a variety of different fintech use cases. Anyway, that’s it for today’s show. If you enjoy these episodes, please go ahead and subscribe, tell a friend, or leave a review. And thanks so much for listening.