From 70 Hours to Minutes: Vestwell CEO Aaron Schumm on Simplifying and Automating Savings

Aaron Schumm, CEO and Founder of Vestwell, knows firsthand how broken America’s savings system is. When he tried to set up a 401k for his previous 30-person company back in 2010, the process was so difficult, expensive, and confusing that he decided to build a better solution. Today, Vestwell serves 2 million savers with $50 billion in assets, has reduced 401k setup times from 40-70 hours down to just minutes, and runs 14 state-sponsored auto IRA programs including New York’s Secure Choice.

In this episode, Aaron explains why fintech has largely failed to move the needle on financial health, too many point solutions that put the onus back on individuals to figure out what to do and then implement it across multiple accounts. His solution? AI agents that will automatically route money from your paycheck to the optimal savings vehicle based on your income, location, tax rates, existing savings, and life circumstances. And he says we’re less than a year away from making that a reality.

In this podcast you will learn:

• What is broken with the current savings system in America.
• The problem at his previous business that was the a-ha moment for Vestwell.
• Their initial use case and how they got going.
• How their product works exactly.
• The three channels they work with.
• How they are working with New York State and other government programs.
• The conversations they are having with the Federal government around savings programs.
• The percentage of employees who typically sign up for an auto-enroll program.
• The scale that Vestwell is at today.
• What their technology stack looks like.
• How much easier it is to set up a workplace savings plan through Vestwell than traditional companies.
• The different revenue lines for Vestwell.
• How they are working with Amazon.
• Why we are not further along in helping Americans with their financial health.
• How autonomous AI agents are going to optimize our financial lives in the future.

Read a transcription of our conversation below.

FINTECH ONE-ON-ONE PODCAST NO. 570: Aaron Schumm

Aaron Schumm

Where it breaks down is the onus is put back on the individual to figure out what to do and then to go implement it. And you’re logging into this account to do this and this account to do this and then over here for this. And you just, it just doesn’t, we don’t function that way as humans. And none of us have time, it’s super complicated. So what we’ve spent an enormous amount of time doing, so this is going back three plus years, is thinking about the data structure you put in place that can house everyone’s information, then we build a lot of AI solutions on top of it that can become agentic around it.

Peter Renton

This is the Fintech 101 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. America has a savings crisis. We’ve all heard the stats. We know we need to save more, but putting the programs in place to make savings easy and automatic are only now just starting to reach scale.

My guest today is Aaron Schumm, CEO and founder of Vestwell. Now, Aaron experienced this problem firsthand when trying to set up a 401k for his previous company that had just 30 people at the time. The process was so difficult, expensive and confusing that he decided to build a better solution. Today, Vestwell serves 2 million savers with $50 billion in assets across 500,000 employers.

They’ve reduced 401k setup times from 40 to 70 hours down to just minutes. And they run 14 state-sponsored auto IRA programs, including New York State’s Secure Choice program. But what really excited me in this conversation was Aaron’s vision for the future. Make sure you listen all the way to the end to hear Aaron’s views on how and when we will have autonomous AI agents optimizing our savings.

Now let’s get on with the show.

Welcome to the podcast, Aaron.

AS: Thank you, Peter. Happy to be here.

PR: Great to have you. So let’s kick it off by giving listeners a little bit of background. Tell us some of the highlights of what you’ve done.

AS: Highlights. man. I don’t know if I’ve done a lot or a little, I’ve been hard. I think the quick synopsis of my background is I started my career in the kind of more traditional, it was actually large corporate or recess, so retirement. And then post-grad school started a fintech platform with another friend in the wealth side of the business. And then after we exited that business, I was a glutton for punishment and decided to do another one and really focused on a broader landscape of still large fintech, but focused on savings.

PR: So before we get into Vestwell, I’d like to just sort of help you frame the conversation a little bit. mean, we all know that Americans don’t save as much as they should. From your perspective, what do you think is the big challenge here? Like what is broken when it comes to the current system for savings in America?

AS: So there’s not a single solution and there’s a lot of aspects that are broken, but the overarching theme is it’s been largely exclusionary. And if you worked at, you know, if you worked at a large corporation, you typically provided with some sort of workplace savings, you know, using the form of a 401k or a 403b. However, if you’re an individual who maybe hasn’t had the opportunity to work at a large business or maybe just a solo entrepreneur or gig worker, you have to think about how should I be saving for myself and my family? And that is a difficult thing for someone to navigate. And what we really try to do is just create broad access, but really solve it at the core issue, which technology has kind of excluded a lot of the population in doing this. So if you think about the issue is tech, but that tech…can be distilled down to being able to include everyone out there in the country.

PR: So then what was the kind of the aha moment or the the founding sort of the story that you what made you decide to start Vestwell?

AS: Long story short, as we were building our last company, we were three years into that business, let’s call it about 2010, and we had about 30 employees and our employees wanted a 401k. So as a principal of the business, I went through kind of the process of finding a provider and standing that up for our employees. And that’s when I realized how difficult it was, right? I’m a product developer by trade, had…you know, had a lot of experience in designing and architecting these systems, especially at large scale. And I was looking at this, why is this so difficult? Right. It’s, it’s confusing. It’s cumbersome. It’s expensive. And that was the aha moment. I actually was wanting to do this as part of my last company, as we were building that and our investors are like, Hey, stay focused on the wealth side. We got too much to do.

And right decision, right? So, but as we, when we exited that, just had this kind of like, it was just stuck in my brain. I was like, I have to go fix this. Like, because if I don’t fix this, who will? And, you know, other people are going to take, you know, different approaches, but I thought, you know, I had the, right approach that could solve it for the longterm. And that’s really what spawned this to set out on the, on the endeavor.

PR: Take us through the early days then. What was the initial product and what was the use case? How did you kind of get going?

AS: Yeah, great question. So the initial use case was actually not that dissimilar from my last business, right? So I’ve been adept to working with large institutions and building broad enterprise scale platforms to help these institutions work with whoever their constituents may be, right? So if you think of a financial advisor working with an individual or family or business, that was really kind of was my first idea of go to market. And so I thought about, hey, how can we build a platform? We’re not going out there and trying to knock on every door across the country, right? You got 100 million households out there. Like, we’re not going to do that, right? That’s a huge marketing and brand endeavor, right? To go build that. So I thought, hey, who has the reach, right? And if you think about these large financial institutions, you’re already working with them in some form of capacity, right? Whether it’s your personal banking, your business banking, you have your own personal financial advisor you work with, with your family.

So I said, hey, how could we equip them to have this conversation where they’re not necessarily experts, right? Because it’s a confusing space. It’s got an insane amount of legal and compliance, and there’s a lot of moving pieces in it. I said, how could I equip an advisor to have this conversation with their client, be a wealth client who maybe is an entrepreneur and has their own business, or whoever it is, and allow them to kind of start that journey?

Version one of this is actually quite interesting and I’ll tell you where we are. But version one was, hey, put it in the advisor’s hand, let them go through, create a proposal for a client, set up a saving solution for a client, and then get them saving. But I miscalculated with how complicated that actually is. It sounds easy. And candidly, we didn’t know enough.

So about the space and the sub-accounting efforts and how all these, the kind of money in and money out and how that actually works. So it took a lot of iterations, but we finally have gotten there and we’re actually starting to redeploy some of the initial concepts we had with Vestwell that we sunset. We said, we can’t do that yet, right? Let’s park it. But now all these things, know, a decade later and now coming back to life and we’re bringing them back and putting them in the advisors hands. And it’s been pretty fun to see how people engage. So we thought about, hey, equip the advisors, allow them to engage. And then we started to expand into other avenues and other channels, if you will, to deploy Vestwell through those relative kind of broad reaches that these partners have with their clients.

PR: So how does the product work exactly? What is it that the advisor is getting?

AS: Yeah, so there’s three channels we work within. So financial institutions, right, which are largely financial advisor led, it could be asset manager led, could be administratively led. There’s a lot of flavors right in that space. It could be a broker dealer, it could be a bank. So we’ll equip them to do it. And it’s usually, most people don’t know it’s Vestwell, right? It’s branded, pick a financial institutions logo, right? It’s their workplace savings or whatever it is.

The second channel we go through are payroll, PEO, HRS providers, right? So you’re paying your employees every couple of weeks or whatever frequency. And then in there, you’re putting contributions into say social security and your 401k and whatever, your 529. All of those pieces are wired together, right? So we’ll work with payroll companies in that capacity. Again, broadly white labeled, right? It’s their brand, it’s their client. We’re just there to really kind of amplify that.

And then the third channel are government led programs. Those could be, you know, typically in the form of like a payroll deducted IRA, it could be a college savings program for your kids, like a 529 program, a disability savings program. We also do student debt, employer pay down and emergency savings. So, broad days, 401Ks, 403Bs, IRAs, 529s, ABLE disability, emergency savings, student debt, employer pay down. And then there’s a couple other, what I would say tax preferred programs that will roll out at some point here down the road.

PR: So you’re providing both the user interface, right? And the back office processing for these programs?

AS: Yes, so they go from logging in to set up their business. there’s there’s, you know, everyone’s coming into Vestwell from an asset manager to an advisor, if there is an advisor to an administrator to the employer, and then the end saver. So they’re all logging into the system to get their view of that their savings. And then the dollars are coming in from wherever they may be from someone’s bank account or someone’s payroll. And then they’re getting dropped into the platform. And then there’s choosing their investments.

They’re choosing how much they want to contribute every pay period, how much they want to save and what they’re saving for. And then the system basically captures all of that information and then stores it underneath. And then we’re trading against it. We’re providing reporting performance. So all your long-term savings are essentially provided within Vestwell on behalf of the institution and the partners that we work with.

PR: So with the payroll companies, are you doing like payroll deductions like as part of the process? Obviously, if you work with an advisor, I imagine it’s all like it’s all post tax, right? When you’re…

AS: It’s actually the same. It’s all pre-tax. It’s all pre-tax. It could be post-tax, right? In certain examples, but primarily it’s pre-tax. So the business says, okay, we’re going to offer, let’s just say a 401k, right? You’re going to offer a 401k to your employees, either through the advisor who’s acting as a relationship and kind of a salesperson in that process or through the payroll company. But in any case, we’re wiring up Vestwell to the employer’s payroll system. And then you’re setting the amount, that every employee is setting the amount they want to contribute for their savings. And then every pay period that flag hits and the monies flow into Vestwell from that payroll company.

PR: What about just like savings, emergency savings? Is that part of what you offer as well? Like beyond just retirement?

AS: Yes, yeah. So emergency savings, ESAs are part of it. So emergency savings typically, again, can come straight from the payroll company into the vest wall system to capture that savings. So you have that of that bucket just in case something happens. And as we know, most people in the country don’t have a thousand dollars saved if they need that in case of emergency. So it’s a great vehicle just to have there. And you kind of forget about it there until you need it for that emergency.

PR: I want to dig into one example that I was reading about. think you started this last year, the New York State Secure Choice Savings Program. Tell us a little bit about that. Obviously that’s a government program. How did you score that as a partner and what exactly is the offering?

AS: Sure. Yeah. So we run about 40 different government programs across the country. And that particular program, the Secure Choice, it’s a payroll deducted IRA. Right. So the employer is offering it to their employees in the form of an IRA, but it’s essentially a Roth. Right. And it’s being deducted from the paycheck and going directly into an individual’s IRA. So it’s somewhat similar to a 401k, except the employer is not sponsoring it, the state is sponsoring it. And then the employees are essentially building, amassing savings over that course that they’re participating.

So we run every auto IRA, secure choice program in the country except for one. So I think we have 14 of them right now, 14 or 15 that we run across the country. New York is obviously a huge state and where I live. So I was super excited to have the opportunity to become the provider of that.

But what they’re doing then is they’re just starting the rollout of this. I think the first wave of the rollout actually is in mid-March. And then there’s essentially three waves that will happen between March and July to say every employer who does not currently offer a workplace savings program will be required by the state to put something in place. And if that employer doesn’t have something in place, this state provides an auto IRA as an option. There’s no cost to the employer. The employee fees are de minimis, but it starts to amass that savings.

And really what it is, is we have a savings crisis. People are not ready for the future. We’re living longer. Our society is not set up for that, right? Our healthcare needs, how much we save our life. We’re not built to sustain that financially. So what this does is really get people entrenched in saving as early as possible, in starting that journey, because we all know we need to do this, right? But oftentimes you park it. You’re like, you don’t wake up in the morning saying, how am gonna save for my future 20, 30, 40 years down the road, right? It’s that thing you keep kind of kicking the can down, but the longer you kick that can, the more of a crisis it becomes for that individual. And then what happens is, if you get to the retirement age and you haven’t amassed that and you’re just depending on social security, it’s typically not enough.

And if someone goes to the hospital and they can’t pay that bill, guess where that hospital turns when that person’s defaulted on their bill, right? They’re going back to the state to say, hey, so-and-so didn’t pay their hospital bill, I need you to pay for it, right? And the states are not equipped to pay for this, right? They’re all in budget crisis. So it’s really kind of, it’s such a great concept to think about. They’re playing a long game in creating savings for individuals. So it doesn’t become intractable. It helps the benefit of the individual’s life. And it doesn’t start, you know, become a drain on society and the government to continue to fund these individuals who haven’t saved enough for the future.

PR: It’s interesting. mean, it feels like it should be a federal program, right? I mean, it would be a complex program to implement, it’s not a New York state crisis. It’s a national crisis. But are you working with any of the agencies federally?

AS: We engage a lot with the Fed on what they’re doing. Some of the initiatives like child savings, for examples, we’re having conversations there. There’s a new savers match initiative, which is really quite similar to the auto IRAs, right? Where the Fed is looking at similar concepts. And what happened was initially when the Fed didn’t take action, the states said, you know what, we’re just gonna do it ourselves. The state started doing it. Then the Fed said, this is…this is working. Right. are engaging. Right. There’s been a couple of billion dollars that have been saved right in the last few years of these programs. They haven’t been around very long. And it’s just, you know, accelerating compounding. So the Fed’s not looking at say, huh, how could we be helpful? Right. So they’re looking at, you know, as you laid out, right, some of the broad legislative initiatives that they could put in place that maybe they don’t rule out their own program, but it gives air cover for the states to go do it themselves and they may help subsidize some of those things, just like they’re trying to do with the child savings programs that have been initiated.

PR: So when you’re working with like the full-profit sector, you’re implementing a 401k or a 403b or something like that. Are most of those plans now auto enroll? Where are we at around that?

AS: Yeah, that’s another great question. I auto enrolls, it’s critical to get engagement, right? When you see, statistically, just broadly, if a plan is not auto enroll, only about 40 % of employees end up saving. Because everyone’s like, hey, I got this upcoming expense, or I got something with my kids I got to go fund, or whatever it is, right? So you kind of start detracting from your long-term savings. The auto enroll, when you do that, you’re seeing 80 % plus participation in these programs.

So we try to, we’re not prescriptive in it, right? We want people to have choice. We try to be very flexible. We’ll advise and we’ll provide guidance, say, hey, you know, this is what you’ll see in this version versus this construct. But auto enroll, it is becoming, you know, obviously the Secure 2.0 started to enforce some of these things for new plan creation. So as new plans coming, you’re going to see, you know, everyone’s going to be auto enrolled but you have a lot of, the country has been put in non-auto enroll. Well, that’s not actually completely accurate, but it wasn’t enforced prior to Secure 2.0. But now with this legislation, we’re gonna see a lot more participation in these programs.

PR: That’s good. It’s much better to have an opt out than an opt in, I think. Okay, so can you give us a sense of what of the scale you’re at? Like how many people are actually using your systems? How many businesses?

AS: We have just about 2 million people that are actively saving on the platform today. We’re converting a bunch of business now, but post that it’ll be a little over 50 billion in savings on the platform. there’s, I think we’re about just over close to 500,000 employers that have access. They’re not all directly contributing payroll yet, but they’ll start to activate over time as the programs get rolled out, then they start processing payroll through the system.

PR: And how big is your team?

AS: Um, just shy of 500 people.

PR: Okay, so you’re obviously at a very decent scale right now. Like what’s the technology stack look like for a company like yours?

AS: Yeah, we’re just coming up this year, we’ll pass our 10 year anniversary, which is pretty exciting. Probably took equivalent amount of years off my life building this, but it’s definitely a worthwhile endeavor. There’s a lot that we’re building and what we’re doing, as we go and we continue to build this platform, I wanna make sure that we are providing the saving solution for everyone in the future.

And there’s a ton that we want to go after and to build, and there’s a lot of work we can do, but the stack itself, we’ve built entirely from the ground up, right? So we’re all the guts behind it, right? The sub-accounting, all the connectivity, all the APIs, all the experiences, although we do have people that will build their own experiences on top of our APIs, but the money in, money out, all the compliance and all the security is all housed within Vestwell. But the stack is all, it’s all AWS Java node structures around it and very modern. Thankfully by the circumstance of timing when we built the company, we’ve had the luxury of building this in a way that society functions today with the ability to continue to build and re-architect as we need. We have a ton of AI that we’ve built into the platform and the data structures around it and how we can secure the platform versus what was done even a decade ago was quite different, Whether it was on-prem or people were newly in the cloud. We’ve kind of, I wouldn’t call it bleeding edge, but it’s far enough into the future that’s acceptable by governments and large institutions, but also tried and true and heavily secure.

PR: I’m curious about the sort of, you talked about the painful process it was when you were trying to set up a 401k for your 30 person company. I mean, a lot of that is government regulations that there’s certain things you just have to do. How much easier have you been able to make it? Like what’s the lift like for someone setting up a 401k through Vestwell?

AS: Without naming names, I will say that some traditional providers that we know very well, it takes them anywhere from 40 to 70 hours to turn on a workplace savings program for a company. So think about the operational lift that requires, right? And that operational lift, you know, essentially turns into cost. That cost then gets passed on to the employer or the saver, which has made it prohibitively expensive for a lot of businesses in the country to offer this. The large institution is no problem, but if you’re a 30 person firm or a hundred person firm, that cost is real.

We can actually do that same process in a matter of minutes. an employer can go, they can set up their company, they can basically go through front to back the entire onboarding process in a few minutes. And then, you know, even if it’s a conversion, that conversion is still maybe a couple hours because you do have to get on the phone sometimes and map out what they’re offering today versus what it will be tomorrow. Some of the legal pieces you have to make sure are buttoned up around it. But the efficiency aspect of it and the overall experience, right, as an employer, as an entrepreneur myself, processing payroll and doing administrative work is the stuff you have to do, but it’s not driving growth and scale for your business. So you want to make it as easy as possible for that CFO or the head of HR that is actually managing this program. And that’s a lot of what we focus on when we’re building this.

PR: Interesting. Wow. I thought there would still be a lot of hours involved just because there’s just so much paperwork. I mean, I’m curious about how can you take that much time out of the process?

AS: So it’s not like one single thing. There is constant re-architecting and reiterating on what we see evolving, right? And it could be anything like plan design is a big one, right? All the configurations that your company will put in place for your program, if it’s a safe harbor, if it’s auto enroll, if there’s loans allowed, if there’s how the tax filings are done, all of these things happen, right? Who’s eligible, how are they eligible, when are they eligible, when are they not eligible, do you have to move them out of the plan? So you have to design and configure all of these things in a workstream. And when you see enough of these businesses, you can start to build scenarios where you’re like, yeah, most people need this, that, have a business that functions like X. So you can tailor down and instead of giving a plethora of 1,500 different options, you’re like, hey, here’s three.

And because we don’t need 1500, right? Most people it’s too confusing. And I think I think largely the financial institutions have done a disservice to employers and savers ultimately, because they’ve also not intentionally, but they’ve tried to accommodate almost too much. You want to accommodate a lot, right? Because you want to you want to meet people where they are and make sure that they’re getting the right the right structure. But they don’t need every permutation under the sun, because then that will ultimately relate, you know, tie back to overhead to support the plan, which will again go back to cost and then someone has to bear that cost. It’s the employer or the end saver.

PR: Okay, so then can you talk us through the economics of your business? Like I imagine there’s set up fees, is there any AUM fees? What are the different lines of revenue?

AS: So we’re very flexible on the cost. It really depends on a lot of our partners and what we’ve done with them and agreed upon. What we try to do as a business as a whole, and this is our philosophy, right, is we want to make it as low cost as possible. Typically we’re, if not the lowest cost provider out there, we’re in that very low tier bucket, right, of cost. It’s usually a per employer per month fee and a per saver per month fee.

Sometimes there’s basis points in there, sometimes there’s not. It really depends on what people want and how people structure it. But if you think about it in the whole, it’s usually, you know, let’s call it 50 to 100 bucks a month per employer. And then let’s say like five to 10 bucks a month per saver. And that cost can be, you know, there’s ways you can kind of structure that where maybe the employer pays nothing and the saver pays it.

We also have structures where the employer and the saver essentially pay no fees other than asset management fees. So there’s a million flavors in there. What we try to do is work with our channel partners and say, OK, who do you want to engage with? How do you want to engage? What’s important to you? And what’s important to your clients? And then come up with a structure that works with everyone but still broadly fits that theme of being a low cost, hyper scalable provider that provides that experience that people expect, know, you know, digital engagement and mobile app and multilingual and all these things that a lot of people wouldn’t get in with other providers.

PR: So I read that you’re working with Amazon. that, is that true?

AS: It is true.

PR: And they’re one of the largest employers on the planet. I mean, how, what, what are you doing with them?

AS: So, know, credit to how they think about this. they had, you know, Amazon probably come to my house two or three times to. But if you think about the drivers out there, right, that are all driving these Amazon trucks, they work for, let’s say like a last mile provider, a delivery service provider. So you think about, so you have the drivers, you have a delivery service provider, and then they’re working with Amazon. What Amazon want to do is create a really kind of a long-term retention policy for all these partners that they work with and the drivers and meeting them where they were.

So we put in this kind of pooled structure so we could power all the advisors and all their savers across the country through these at a low cost structure, but it’s multilingual. It’s really flexible, right? And you think about if you’re a driver, they’re not sitting in front of a computer like you or I, right? They’re driving around, they’re doing what they need to do, so they need to access it on the go. They’re not, you know, what we call kind of wired at work, if you will. So you want to make sure that they can do this and participate. So that’s really the structure we put in place with them. And then we worked with our partners on it, right?

We worked with some of the large financial institutions that also have relationships with Amazon. And we brought it all together and said, hey, let’s come up with a structure that really helps, you know, fuel the future for these drivers out there.

PR: So before we close, really want to spend a little bit of time on the future because one of the things that I’ve been disappointed with, with the progress of FinTech, you know, I’ve been doing this for 15, 16 years now, and I thought we would have made more of an impact on the financial health of the average Americans. And there’s better tools now, there’s lots of things that help, but we haven’t really moved the needle dramatically.

And I’d love to get your perspective. You’ve got a great vantage point here of working with, you know, like almost 2 million savers around the country. I mean, what do you think it’s going to take to really move the needle where they say, when someone says, well, an emergency expense, oh, we’ve got like 80 % of the country can handle that now. I mean, it just feels like we haven’t made much progress. Can we, or is this an intractable problem?

AS: No, I agree with your statement that it is not as far along as we need it to be. However, I think we are helping to solve that in a material way. And where I think it has broken down, there’s been a lot of great solutions that have been built, right? And I would classify some of these solutions like point solutions, right? Where you could come up with a great financial wellness tool and a calculator and this and that.

However, where it breaks down, is the onus is put back on the individual to figure out what to do and then to go implement it. And you’re logging into this account to do this and this account to do this and then over here for this. you just, it just doesn’t, we don’t function that way as humans. And none of us have time, it’s super complicated.

So what we’ve spent an enormous amount of time doing, so this is going back three plus years is thinking about the data structure you put in place that can house everyone’s information. Then we build a lot of AI solutions on top of it that can become agenetic around it. And what we are on the precipice of doing, so we’re right now when you log into Vestwell, whether you know it’s Vestwell or it’s branded some other brand, you can see if you have a workplace savings program, your 401k, you could see your kids college savings program. If you have a family member with a disability, you’ll see that program. You’ll see all these accounts listed as individual. Then we have planning solutions built in.

Now, where we’re changing how this works is we’ve architected all of it. It’s in one house, it’s in one architecture, and we can actually take action on what solutions advise you to do. Because where it broke down was, again, you had to go figure out, hey, you know what? I got to go open a college savings program for my kid. Where do I do that? What’s the best state to do that in? Right? What’s the most tax advantageous structure? What is? So if you think about where the unique perch that Vestwell’s sitting in, we have an enormous amount of data around everyone. We know where they live, what they get paid, when they get paid, know, inferred tax rates based on the individual’s income and states and whatnot.

 We can actually start to think about, what should they be saving for? If you have $100 from your paycheck, you can put somewhere. Where does it go? It might not have, maybe shouldn’t go to your 401k today. Maybe you’ve already maxed it out or you’ve reached a threshold where it might be more advantageous for you to think about, I need to go save for an emergency or I need to go save for my kid’s college. So what we’re very close to doing, we’re kind of toying around with some prototypes right now to take a dollar from someone’s paycheck. and put it in that next best savings bucket. So it’s like a true next best dollar savings vehicle to start to allocate these monies in the most appropriate spot based on who the individual is and not just do it in a blanket statement.

PR: So do you think then in the near future, we’re going to all have autonomous agents that are going to be optimizing our financial lives?

AS: Yeah, absolutely. Like if you think about it, if I was like, hey, I need to save for whatever my future or here are the three things I care about, the agents should be able to devise a structure that sets it up for you. And then it’s just happening, right? It’s just going in the background. You think about if you’re a gig worker, you’re not going to have a 401k. You might have a SEP or a simple or an IRA, right? And then it’s like thinking about, okay, what are the structures there that make sense? And then what else should I be saving for?

So we think about like broadly, right? We want people to save for their long-term future retirement. We want people to save for healthcare and disability needs. And we want people to save for educational needs. So if you can do that and devise structures that are most appropriate for an individual based on every single person’s life, that is really powerful than just saying, hey, here’s a tool, go figure.

PR: So how far away are we from that world, do think?

AS: Less than a year.

PR: Wow, okay.

AS: So it is, like I said, we’ve spent a lot of time. First, we had to bring all these programs together on a single architecture, right? Then we had to make sure all the data was surfacing as properly. Then we’ve built, you we have close to 50 different chatbots now. And, you know, the point where we’re like, you can take like, hey, can I take a loan? And then it’s like, well, here’s the parameters if you take a loan or not. Now the system can say, you can take a loan. Here’s what your plan allows. Here’s what you’re eligible for. Do you want me to distribute the funds? And it all happens real time without the paperwork and the confusion that’s plugged into it.

PR: That is very interesting. Well, we’re out of time, I’m afraid Aaron, that was, it’s fascinating. really appreciate you coming on the show. Great to hear more about your company and if we can solve the savings crisis here or really make a big dent in it, I think that we’ll have done a great thing for the world. So thanks again, Aaron. Great to chat with you.

AS: Thank you. Thank you. Thanks for having me.

PR: I came away from this conversation much more optimistic about the future of savings in America. Aaron nailed it when he said FinTech has largely failed to use the needle on financial health because solutions give people tools and advice but then put the onus back on individuals to implement it. And it is difficult to know what is the best solution for your individual situation.

What he’s doing is revolutionary. AI agents that automatically route money from your paycheck to the optimal savings vehicle based on comprehensive data about you, your income, location, tax rates, existing savings, goals and life circumstances. The fact that he says we are less than one year away from this reality gives me hope. Now, it will take decades to fully roll out, but in the not too distant future, we will all have autonomous agents optimizing our financial life. And that should really move the needle on financial health.

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.