Addition Wealth is rolling out an AI-powered financial guidance system for financial institutions’ customers and employers as it looks to offer more personalized support than general-purpose AI tools.
The financial wellness company, which is rebranding as Addable, calls the system an “orchestration layer,” which brings together information about a person’s finances from their employer or financial institution, along with information they share themselves. It uses that information to identify decisions they may need to make and suggest next steps. The platform can also recommend when users speak with a human advisor or users can request one directly.
“We’ve brought together the ecosystem from our data and our aggregation capabilities and the data that we get from an institution and from external third parties,” said Amy Chou, Addable’s chief product officer and chief operating officer. “We bring that together with AI-native solutions to help people solve their personal finances end to end across any financial topic that they want to talk about.”
The system draws on data from several sources to help figure out what a person might need to do next. That could include information from an employer about payroll, benefits or an equity event, along with account balances. It can also use information the user shares, third-party data, and notes or transcripts from conversations with advisors, Chou said.
On the employer side of the business, the company serves ADT, fintechs Ramp and Alloy, and mobility company Lime as clients. Edward Jones has partnered with Addition Wealth to make its platform available alongside workplace retirement plans; its venture arm has also invested in the company.
The platform uses generative AI to interpret structured and unstructured information, although some recommendations follow predetermined rules. Chou said the system might alert a user to a financial decision they need to make or suggest a question they could ask the platform’s AI chatbot. It can also share information about the user’s circumstances with their financial institution or advisor.
An employee deciding whether to sell company shares in a secondary sale could turn to Addable for help, Chou said. Addable may already have information from the employer about the equity plan and upcoming sale and details about the employee’s holdings.
The system can then alert the employee to an approaching deadline and invite users to consult an AI chatbot to field questions about the sale, including how much they may be eligible to sell. The platform can also link to the portal where the employee makes the decision.
When to Bring in a Human
Some employees may be comfortable working through an equity decision on their own with a chatbot, while others may want to talk to a human advisor. The platform can loop in human advisers if a user appears to be struggling, Chou said. Users can also request one directly.
When a user moves from the chatbot to an advisor, the platform passes along information they’ve already shared, Chou said.
The need for human support varies from person to person, she said. Financial decisions, she noted, often involve emotions and trade-offs that can lead people down different trajectories for similar tasks.
“No two people will likely make the same set of decisions despite having, let’s say, the same exact numbers in their bank account and their investment account,” Chou said.
In an Addition Wealth survey of 1,000 U.S. adults ages 18 to 64, conducted in April, 39% said they preferred financial guidance led by a person with AI support, while 33% wanted guidance exclusively from a person. Just 5% preferred guidance that was entirely AI-driven.
A separate PwC survey of 1,004 U.S. consumers conducted this year found that 87% said they would “continue to value human financial guidance even as AI tools become more advanced.”
Addable relies on outside AI models and, when working with financial institutions, selects models those institutions have approved, Chou said. The company applies its own quality-assurance checks and financial-planning guardrails. It also works with financial professionals to inform the system’s logic and can adapt guardrails for institutional clients. Addable is also a registered investment advisor, according to Chou.
Founded in 2021, the company has two offerings: Addable, which financial institutions can configure with their own branding, products and advisors; and Addable Money, a financial wellness benefit employers provide to employees.
Addition Wealth announced $4.2 million in funding in 2022 from investors including Nyca Partners, Core Innovation Capital, the Female Innovators Lab by Barclays, Anthemis, and Restive Ventures. The company has since received additional strategic funding but has not disclosed the total amount raised.
Photo by Vitaly Gariev via Unsplash
