American Express taps startup BodesWell for expansion into financial planning

Published July 15, 2021

American Express is branching out into financial planning, with a little help from a seven-person startup called BodesWell.

This week, the credit card giant launched a pilot of its first self-service digital financial planning tool, dubbed “My Financial Plan (MFP).” The six-month pilot kicked off on July 11 with about 25,000 select Amex cardmembers.

American Express quietly invested in BodesWell in late 2020 via its venture arm, Amex Ventures. Since then, the financial services behemoth teamed up with the tiny startup to develop the financial planning tool for its users. The new product is designed to give users a complete picture of their financial health and help them make and achieve major life goals, such as buying a house or retirement.

TechCrunch talked with Amex Ventures’ Julia Huang, who led the investment and strategy around the new product, and BodesWell co-founder and CEO Matthew Bellows to learn more details.

The pair actually met while serving on a panel together in 2019.

“I was drawn to the fact that it was not a round-up savings tool, but rather a holistic tool to understand your full financial picture that could be used to plan for the financial impact of your life decisions,” Huang told TechCrunch.

Before deciding to invest in BodesWell, Huang says Amex Ventures — which over time has backed more than 70 startups — had “evaluated the space quite extensively.”

Huang introduced Bellows and his staff to Amex’s Digital Labs team and they embarked on jointly developing a specialized offering for Amex customers. (While Bellow is based in Boston, he says the startup is “globally distributed.”)

“Our goal is to democratize financial planning with our cardmembers by providing detailed insights and forecasts to help them with their holistic planning,” she told TechCrunch.

Image Credits: Amex Ventures

Bellows started BodesWell in early 2019 with the goal of empowering clients and customers to build their own financial plan.

“So much of financial planning software is aimed at financial advisors, and requires them to run it,” he said. “So, most people can’t get the benefits of financial planning…Our hope is to expand benefits to a lot more people.”

BodesWell will guide users in setting up a financial plan and will work even better if they sync with their other financial information via Plaid so it can “update in real time,” Huang said.

The tool “takes into account income, assets, expenses and liabilities — what cash flow looks like holistically so that users can drag & drop to plan life events,” Bellow said.

An estimated 85 million American households don’t have a financial, planner for a variety of reasons — including mistrust of a planner’s intentions or just feeling overwhelmed by the process.

The product is free during the pilot phase and American Express hasn’t yet determined if it will charge for it afterwards.

“We’re gauging first for engagement and the power of the product for our customers,” Huang told TechCrunch. “We want to make sure the product resonates and that we iterate on the product to make sure it’s good for the broader population. Our primary goal is that our customers use it and find it valuable.”

Amex Ventures has formed “some level of partnership” with more than two-thirds of its portfolio companies, she added.

“We try to engage with our portfolio in that way, to provide value with our startup ecosystem,” Huang said.

For its part, BodesWell had previously raised about $1.5 million from investors such as Cleo Capital, Ex Ventures, Riot.vc, GritCapital and Argon Capital and angels like HubSpot CEO Brian Halligan and Kintent CEO Sravish Sridhar.

Startups Weekly: US companies raised $30B in Q1 2019

Published April 6, 2019

Let’s start this week’s newsletter with some data. Nationally, startups pulled in $30.8 billion in the first quarter of 2019, up 22 percent year-on-year, according to Crunchbase’s latest deal round-up.

A closer look at the numbers shows a big drop in angel funding and a slight decrease in mega-rounds, or financings larger than $100 million. The number of mega-rounds fell to 57 deals in Q1 and deal value was down too. With that said, mega-rounds still accounted for $16.4 billion, making Q1 2019 the second-best quarter on record for mega-rounds.

The bottom line is these monstrous deals represented a big chunk (29 percent) of all the dollars invested in U.S. startups in Q1. As investors move downstream and startups opt to stay private longer and longer, we’ll continue to see a greater pick up in mega rounds.

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OK, on to other news…

IPO corner

Once trading after the pink confetti was swept up off the floor, analysts and investors had a different story to tell about one of the first unicorns to make its public debut. Lyft began the week struggling to hit its IPO price, closing several days under that $72, despite opening with a 20 percent pop at $86. What’s going on? People are shorting the Lyft stock, looking to profit off the company’s sinking value. Things are looking up though; on Friday as I typed this newsletter, Lyft was trading at about $74 per share.

.@Uber sent @Lyft a whole bunch of cakes on IPO day, how nice. pic.twitter.com/hbZC5HOxbL

— Kate Clark (@KateClarkTweets) April 5, 2019

In other IPO, or shall I say, direct listing news, Slack has reportedly chosen the NYSE for its upcoming exit. A quick reminder why Slack has opted to go public via direct listing: The company doesn’t need any IPO cash thanks to the hundreds of millions of dollars on its balance sheet, but its longtime employees and investors need the liquidity. A direct listing allows it to go public without listing any new shares, with no lockup period and no intermediary bankers. The process saves it some money and expedites the process. OK, that wasn’t as brief as I intended, moving on…

Saying goodbye to venture capital

In a story that sent the entirety of Silicon Valley into a frenzy, Forbes reported that Andreessen Horowitz was denouncing its status as a venture capital firm and would register all its employees as financial advisors. For those inclined, Crunchbase News’ Alex Wilhelm and I unpacked what this means in the latest episode of Equity; for those less inclined, here’s the TLDR: For a16z to have the freedom to make riskier bets, like buying public company stock or heaps of cryptocurrency, the title of financial advisor gives them that ability.

Femtech’s billion-dollar year

Femtech, defined as any software, diagnostics, products and services that leverage technology to improve women’s health, has attracted some $250 million in VC funding so far this year, according to PitchBook. That puts the sector on pace to secure nearly $1 billion in investment by year-end, greatly surpassing last year’s record of $650 million. For more historical context, startups in the space brought in only $62 million in 2012, $225 million in 2014 and $231 million in 2016.

The 20-Min Term Sheet

Alternative financier Clearbanc says it will invest $1 billion in 2,000 e-commerce startups in 2019. Here’s the catch: Until the companies have paid back 106 percent of Clearbanc’s investment, Clearbanc takes a percentage of their revenues every month. Clearbanc’s goal is to help companies preserve equity, favoring a revenue share model rather than the traditional VC model, which eats equity in startups in exchange for capital. I spoke to Clearbanc co-founder Michele Romanow to learn more about Clearbanc’s attempt to disrupt venture capital.

Startup capital

Extra Crunch

TechCrunch’s Megan Rose Dickey authored the be-all-end-all story on the shared-electric-scooter business. Here’s a quick passage: “The startup ecosystem had become accustomed to the ethos of begging for forgiveness, rather than asking for permission. But that’s not the case with electric scooters. These companies have found their entire businesses to be contingent on the continued approval from individual cities all over the world. That inherently creates a number of potential conflicts.” Extra Crunch subscribers can read the full story here.

Plus, we dropped the Niantic EC-1, in which Greg Kumparak dives deep into the history of the maker Pokemon Go, contributor Sherwood Morrison looked at remote workers and nomads, who represent the next tech hub.

Unicorns are investors, too

TechCrunch has confirmed that Airbnb has invested between $150 million to $200 million in Indian hotel startup Oyo. Airbnb confirmed the existence of the deal but not the exact amount. The home-sharing giant is continuing to widen its focus beyond “unconventional” hotels as it prepares to begin selling pubic market investors on its long-term vision. Remember, this deal comes right after its big acquisition of HotelTonight.

M&A

WeWork acquired Managed by Q this week, a VC-backed startup that helps office managers and other decision-makers handle supply stocking, cleaning, IT support and other non-work related tasks in the office by simply using the Managed by Q dashboard. The company was most recently valued at $250 million, having raised a total of $128.25 million from investors such as GV, RRE and Kapor Capital.

#Equitypod

If you enjoy this newsletter, be sure to check out TechCrunch’s venture-focused podcast, Equity. In this week’s episode, available here, Crunchbase News editor-in-chief Alex Wilhelm and I chat about the future of a16z, Jumia’s IPO, the Midas list and more of this week’s headlines.