Doesn't grow on trees: The mission at Claro is to teach customers the realities of good money management
Plan to accumulate If people don’t know their ETF from their ESG, how on earth are they supposed to make the right investment decisions? For mission-driven, personal financial coaching app, Claro, the answer is simple. We’ll teach them, says Chief Revenue Officer Alex Ford An idea, from inception through to execution, inevitably undergoes refinement along the way. And this is proving to be the case with Claro Money’s financial coaching app. Founded in August 2019 Claro, lead by CEO Rob Brockington – a 15-year trading floor veteran managing complex algorithmic execution platforms – Claro Money started out as a pure-play trading app with an ESG (environmental, social and governance) data element. Following Google Ventures Design Thinking methodology and listening to user feedback has seen Claro morph into a platform aimed at ‘working with people’ rather than ‘working for people’, while
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retaining its ESG, ethical core. Now Claro Money is looking to provide the necessary education, support, community and tools needed to build a personalised financial plan, in addition to also match users to financial products that align to their core values and personal situation. As Alex Ford, its chief revenue officer, explains: “As we started to speak to more people about investing, saving, and general finance, a repeated comment was ‘they don’t teach you this stuff at school’. As a team, we must’ve conducted over two dozen user interviews face-to-face, as well as seven or eight surveys, reaching out to roughly 30,000 people. “We ended up thinking that, instead of
focussing on the execution end of the investment space, which is what a lot of people are doing, why not do something different and build value by helping investors to learn and plan their finances? We want to help people understand the ‘why’ behind it as well as the ‘how’. That way, users will be much better informed and empowered to make educated decisions about what they’re doing with their finances,” says Ford.
Feelgood-factor investing Set to launch in 2021, Claro Money has been in development for the last nine months, growing from an original team of three to more than 14 during the www.fintech.finance