HN user
The aspirational vs motivated user. It's like people being told they need to go to the gym by the sales person vs the person who gets up at 6am to just work out.
So you didn't read the article and now you're just throwing out statements without validation? Great, if JPMorgan is selling your data then that's their decision and that's beyond the scope of this convo. We work with partners (Plaid, Snaptrade) who explicitly state that they DO NOT sell user data, and we maintain the same principles:
Here is the quote if you're too lazy to read this one too:
Does Plaid sell my financial data for advertising or marketing purposes?
No, we do not sell your financial data to third parties for marketing or advertising purposes.
Plaid only shares your data to power the services and products that you choose or to protect you and the Plaid network from fraud.
Plaid was founded on the principle that you have a right to your financial information and we are focused on providing products that allow you to safely and conveniently access your data and harness the power of Plaid’s secure financial network.
As Plaid develops more products and services, you may ask Plaid to share your information in ways that benefit you and that you control.
I really don't think you read this article beyond the headline because that's not what it's about or implying...literally in the slightest.
That article is about JPMorgan being able to charge Plaid or other providers for the middleman access. They used to be operating almost for free, now Plaid has to pay for access the same way companies like mine pay Plaid.
That's kind of just a brag about being wealthy though, isn't it? For many people who are trying to get escape velocity to being financially secure, tracking spending + investments is a necessary reality.
No one is saying it's healthy but if you have debt, can't save or don't have investments on track to meet your future needs then what's more unhealthy, monitoring or lower living standards?
Did you find a suitable replacement? What do you use now? I'm interested to hear how big of an sticking point this still is with this a verbose range of options now.
I'm one of your customers, love the product!
Hey, going to shamelessly plug here. We do portfolio guidance as an RIA: https://www.fulfilledwealth.co/
Free to try. Shoot us an email if you want a demo.
You're correct here. The banks have limited who they are allowing into their systems more and more right now. We wanted to build direct partnerships with trading institutions to leverage their brokerages but they'd tell us to speak with their whitelisted partners like Plaid or a new (YC backed) incumbent, Snaptrade.
I'm a founder in this space (Fulfilled - posted above). Here's the reality: You're right that incentives matter. But selling your data would be idiotic for us, same reason it would be for your bank in that trust is the entire business model.
If we want to monetize insights from aggregated data, we'd do it in-house and offer you better products. Example: Why sell your mortgage readiness data to some broker when we could source competitive mortgage offers and present them directly to you? Keep you in our ecosystem, add value to your experience, and build a revenue stream that doesn't destroy the core product.
The wealth space is crowded. Companies that burn user trust get exposed fast and die faster. The only sustainable path is treating your data like it belongs to you and not us. Any company here who doesn't get that is building on quicksand and I'd be very surprised to hear any of the larger players engaging in those practices but maybe I'm naive.
Either way, it's why we're a Fiduciary and that blankets the entire product suite.
A lot of it is going to be needs & vibes based. Some of them have more in-depth and niche features in certain areas, like transaction splitting or categorization and others are just simple and clean UI to go for ease of use.
Will shamelessly promote ours as well: https://www.fulfilledwealth.co/
We're entering the same market but with a tilt towards investment & actionable guidance. Same read-only capabilities on the account sync side (although our budgeting + spending side is still heavily in development) except we're an RIA that can provide professional advise (for free).
Other co-founder here. Really would love to hear some feedback on the approach, testing & general app use is free w/ no payments required!
Hey, good question! We deliver holistic wealth management as a single integrated experience.
Most retail platforms are vertically segmented, separate tools & products for investing, budgeting, savings, etc.
Users have to figure out which product to use and when. Or worse, they get cross-sold products they dont need. If you sign up for betterment or wealthfront right now you're left guessing where to start and whats appropriate. We step in where a family office or high networth adviser would, with a fiduciary duty to put your needs first as a SEC Registered Investment Adviser.
Our implementation: We analyze your complete financial picture (via Plaid/Oauth integration), then via reasoning models and deterministic logic surface the right feature at the right time based on what's actually blocking your wealth growth. If debt is your biggest issue, we guide you there first, not because you selected "debt management" but because that's you need.
Investment recommendations, budgeting features, debt paydown strategies, they all work together as one cohesive plan, not separate products you have to stitch together yourself.
Working on personalized financial planning & investing for retail investors: https://fulfilledwealth.co
We're a SEC Registered Investment Advisor that combines financial planning with institutional style investment portfolios that are designed to achieve financial goals.
Highlights:
- Full money management platform at the core - expenses, budgeting, tracking across all your accounts. But instead of stopping there, we actually provide wealth building & financial planning tools.
- We model our investment portfolios using forward-looking institutional research at the asset class level and then recommend it to users as public ETFs that track the underlying index. This is extremely low cost for the client and allows us to model & manage custom portfolios unique to each goal that is created.
- No transfers needed, everything is GUIDED through your existing accounts via secure sync. We literally show you what to buy, when to buy it, how much, and (eventually) where to do it in your own brokerage/bank accounts. You stay in control, we just tell you the exact steps.
What's next:
- Building out "financial playbooks" next. Think step-by-step guided modules that walk you through achieving specific goals (building an emergency fund, buying a house, retirement planning, etc) with the investment strategy baked directly into it where appropriate. The idea is to combine the actual tactical planning actions (what accounts to open, important action dates, tax optimization moves) with the investment management, so it's a truly personalized experience.
Currently in open beta in the US. Any feedback is welcome!
Very apt metaphor you got here. I feel like I let you down.
The product is in early days and in a closed alpha right now. We're looking for test users that are willing to work with us and provide feedback as we squash bugs and build out the platform out of it's infancy.
What you just described is the whole point. If you just responded to that email, one of the co-founders would reach out directly with a question or two and next steps.
We know we are dealing with a touchy but all important subject of managing people's wealth/investments, so it would be irresponsible to allow open account creation and access to investment recommendations without doing our due diligence as founders at this stage.
You might not like the approach (totally fair), but it's brought us incredibly engaged and enthusiastic initial users who's feedback is directly going back into the app in a quick iterative loop.
1. None of our portfolios are static or bucketed. We run the model on each goal/portfolio and it produces the optimal portfolio for that set of circumstances (goal, time horizon, risk, expected return).
2. You're 100% right, goals like vacation & car are going to be variable depending on the users inputs when creating the goal. We have a confidence question in the goal creation, ie. "how important is this goal to you". If the user selects that they have to have it by their given date, the model is going to opt for money market funds and potentially a small allocation to a return generating asset. This goal would lean heavily on the users contributions and not returns.
On the flip side, if it's something like a vacation fund where you are okay with not having a strict deadline ("nice to have, not certain"), then the model will have access to more return generating assets to help the portfolio generate a return. This is more about financial planning then it is pure investing. You're 100% right, but the user controls their own fate there.
3. Again you are correct that historically, an all S&P500 portfolio will have out-performed a target date portfolio but who's doing that? What institution, advisor or robo would advocate that any client is 100% invested in US equities?
We're not targeting pure performance here, it's risk adjusted returns factoring in for large drawdowns. We can model a portfolio that returns the exact same average 30-yr trailing return as the S&P500 at half the expected volatility (not really a brag, that's what robos and portfolio managers are trying to do as well).
If you're the type of person who can handle the volatility of investing in a 1 ETF portfolio then the product here isn't for you. I'd just recommend that you go and check the capital market expectations for the S&P500 over the next 10-25 years because it's actually trailing behind other global equities.
Blackrock has the following CMAs:
Ex-US equities
5 yr : 9.0% 10 yr: 8.6% 20 yr: 8.0% vol: 16.9%
US equities
5 yr: 6.2% 10 yr: 6.7% 20 yr: 7.4% vol: 18.4%
Forward looking estimates of course, but you can see my point. You're not even getting the optimal 1 ETF portfolio by simply buying SP500.
You're correct! I made the fix.
For sure! Let's take a pension fund as an example. When asset managers are looking at getting the returns to meet future obligations they are not simply looking at a simple formula of risk-adjusted returns. What they're actually doing is combining factors such as liquidity, time-horizon, hedging across multiple countries, geographies and (most importantly) asset classes. All of that is to say that they need to be sure that on date "X" they are able to meet forecasted obligation "Y".
That's the approach we've taken here. Pooling capital market expectations for 30+ global asset classes and taking into consideration the risk basis, time horizon, the financial goal (ie. is this a general wealth building portfolio or your retirement fund) and then yes, creating rules & heuristics around the type of asset classes that are appropriate for that unique situation. Then as the portfolio ages and your "path" matures (we use a glidepath structure to maintain a volatility cap over the lifetime of the portfolio), the portfolio dynamically adjusts the risk downwards and into a less volatile portfolio that favors capital preservation over accumulation.
All that is done through publicly traded ETFs that represent the asset classes but it's more granular then the way you typed it out. Rather then just being "large cap" it would be "US Large Cap", "ex-US Large Cap", "European Large Cap", "APAC Large Cap", etc. It's not just about risk though, with the most obvious modern example being crypto. Most advisors in 2025 are saying 2.5-5% of a portfolio can go into the asset class but does that make sense if you're investing for a down payment on a house in 5 years? You're going to want higher returning assets that are less volatile like infrastructure equity or private credit (same return profile, less volatile).
The net result is far greater risk adjusted returns and likelihood of actually achieving your financial goals because you've built your overall portfolio piece by piece with the goals as the building blocks.
No, it wasn't.
Yeah, it's a $20 discount billed annually.
Very fair comments, platform was not slapped together with AI. Landing redesign, was. We're in the process of putting a more robust about us page now with more details about us and the company.
Great feedback!
I'd just argue that even the 0.8% from Schwab is $4,000 on their minimum of $500,000. Where I worked (high networth wealth management at large bank) we had a minimum of 1 million and the starter fee was 1.35% or 13,500 annually. Definitely not a crack pot scam advisor and the portfolio management we did was very similar to what we've built out on this app.
We're doing more advanced portfolio construction at the client level then what you're going to get from Schwab and it's $100 a year vs $4000. If the relationship aspect of the advisory channel is important to you, then totally valid and fair point. This platform is aimed at the middle-market of people who aren't financially able to meet those minimums but want a better service then just automated portfolios.
Customization
Great point! We would just not consider risk appetite an actual customization. After you've selected your risk, you're placed/bucketed into one of five portfolios that they offer and manage themselves.
What we do is factor in the risk appetite of the user plus the goal itself (whether you have a date you want the funds for or the importance of the goal) and then model it against evolving capital market expectations featuring 30+ domestic & global asset classes, constructing the optimal ETF portfolio to meet your return requirement at the lowest risk possible.
Investment strategies
Another good point that we need to make more clear. We are modeling these portfolios using an institutional model with a wide range of asset classes and a "glidepath" (target date) structure like the US retirement portfolios. This prioritizes capital accumulation at earlier stages and then de-risks the portfolio gradually to make sure you have the capital you need as you reach your goal. It's a dynamic portfolio that evolves over time.
Of course there is waste in the federal gov but somehow I think Elon ripping food from starving children and torching the agencies that regulate his businesses isn't actually going to solve that problem.
People who proudly attached their names to doge will go down in the history books as the people responsible for hundreds of thousands (or millions, in time) of deaths and the outright larceny of structure & privacy from the American people.
Nothing could be more shameful.