If anybody is working on the financial services one I would love to talk to you about it. My day job is in that industry and I think there is a ton of room for innovation. Sometimes it is hard to convince people in the industry of that as they retain the ideas they came up with. I recall hearing somebody say in a talk (or maybe on Twitter) recently that industry disruption happens from people outside of the industry rather than people inside the industry.
Ultimately I think something that provides a whole financial picture is what is needed (I think Learnvest is trying to do that). I picture something along the lines of a combination of Credit Karma, You Need a Budget, and Vanguard as being the way to go.
My email and twitter are in my profile if you would like to talk.
Reading the new list of Y-Combinator “Requests for Startups”, the Financial Services request really resonated with me.
Probably the best investing advice for people is really straightforward; you need to start saving now in order to reap the benefits when you retire.
A set of simple questions, such as your age, whether or not you are contributing to a 401k, and your net worth would probably get you 90% of the way there; from that information alone, most investing advice would follow based of basic mortality statistics, historical stock market performance, and the average retirement age.
The hard part is to start putting money away; that is, to start saving a significant portion of your savings and investing them in the market.
One way to do that might be to make it a one-time decision. What if there was a site where in order to sign-up you were required to setup direct deposit to special investing account? The investing account would, in turn, take a percentage of your salary, and invest it in age-appropriate index funds. The remainder would be re-deposited into a person’s local checking account. That way, it would feel like you only had the net amount that ends up in your checking account, and the invested amount would be removed before you had a chance to contemplate spending it.
A setup like this is something that someone could easily do for themselves using a discount broker, but a site that would more or less make it a one-time decision could be really helpful, because it would remove much of anxiety and education that a person typically has to go through to get this right.
Ultimately I think something that provides a whole financial picture is what is needed (I think Learnvest is trying to do that). I picture something along the lines of a combination of Credit Karma, You Need a Budget, and Vanguard as being the way to go.
My email and twitter are in my profile if you would like to talk.