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American Express taps startup BodesWell for expansion into financial planning
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.
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Kintent nabs $4M seed to automate compliance questionnaire process
Every tech vendor has to pass security muster with customers, typically a tedious activity involving answering long questionnaires. Kintent, a new startup that wants to automate this process, announced a $4 million seed today led by Tola Capital with help from a bunch of tech industry angel investors.
After company co-founder and CEO Sravish Sridhar sold his previous startup Kinvey, which provided backend as a service to mobile app developers, he took a couple of years off while he decided what to do next. The sale to Progress Software in 2017 gave him that luxury.
He knew firsthand from his experience at Kinvey that companies like his had to adhere to a lot of compliance standards, and the idea for the next company began to form in his head. He wanted to create a new startup that could make it easier to figure out how to become compliant with a given standard, measure the current state of compliance and get recommendations on how to improve. He created Kintent to achieve that goal.
“So the big picture idea is can we build a system of record for trust and our first use case is information security and data privacy compliance, specifically if you’re a company that is building a SaaS business and you’re storing customer data or PHI, which is health information,” Sridhar explained.
The company’s product is called Trust Cloud. He says that they begin by looking at the lay of your technology land in terms of systems and the types of information you are storing, looking at how compliant each system is with whatever standard you are trying to adhere to.
Then based on how you classify your data, the Trust Cloud generates a list of best practices to stay in compliance with your desired standard, and finally it provides the means to keep testing to validate what you’ve done and that you are remaining in compliance.
The company launched in 2019, spent the first part of 2020 developing the product and began selling it last October. Today, it has 35 paying customers. “We’re in the high six figures in revenue. We’ve been growing at about 20-30% month-over-month consistently since we launched in October, and the customers are across 11 verticals already,” he said.
With 14 employees and some money in the bank from this funding round, he is thinking ahead to adding people. He says that diversity has to be more than something you just talk about, and he has made it one of the core founding values of the company, and one he takes very seriously.
“I’m very conscious with every hire that we make that we’re really pushing to extend ourselves to [find] people from different walks of life, different statuses and so on,” he said.
The company is also working on a DEI component for the Trust Cloud, which it will be offering for free, which enables companies to provide a set of diversity metrics to measure against and then report on how well you are doing, and how you can improve your numbers.
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