Uprise is a new fintech app that has launched to help the Gen Z manage their money in a ‘digital family office’, after a $1.4m seeding round.
Founded by Jessica Chen Riolfi, its CEO, and Chris Goodmacher in 2021, the app has launched in the US with a 7000-strong waiting list. It will initially be available in the US with plans to launch abroad in the coming years.
Chen Riolfi was previously employed as the chief of staff to the head of product at Robinhood, and was formerly the Head of Asia for Wise. Goodmacher on the other hand was an early employee at a HR Tech Firm, JustWorks. The team also includes two former executives from Robinhood, SoFi, Stripe, Gusto, and Cashapp.
The idea behind Uprise is to help Gen Z, the demographic succeeding Millennials to optimize their financial lives, inclusive of building credit, pensions, and employer benefits through automated processes connected to users accounts and bank accounts.
With a market flooded by different Fintech apps, Uprise wants to offer an unbiased view of which neo bank or saving account to go for.
“There are so many fintechs out there, and for Gen Z in particular, there’s a tonne of different types of financial products, trying to make a grab at their money. Everybody wants your direct deposits, everybody wants, your cash. How do you make sense of that?” said Chen Riolfi, Founder and CEO at Uprise.
She also mentioned that alternatives include researching, reading finance books, or scrolling through social media, which costs time and a lack of transparency.
“We personalise and tailor it so that you don’t have to wade through the mess of content that’s out there and say, ‘this is exactly what I should do,” she added. While the central product is to provide a digital family office-like service, the accounts are reviewed by human experts.
“We are democratising access to private family offices. This is, what I mean by this is that, basically, there’s somebody in the long term, there’s somebody like keeping an eye out optimising all of your finances, so that you can sleep better at night,” Chen Riolfi told AltFi.
“We deliver a hyper-personalised financial plan that is 90 per cent automated but we always keep a human in the loop to make sure that the recommendations are spot on, and to also build trust,” she added.
“The coolest thing we’ve been able to do so far in our private data is we found $1.5m on average to add to each customer’s lifetime net worth with just a few small tweaks to their finances,” she said.
Chen said that apart from expansion to the UK and Europe, longer term plans include attaining regulatory permissions to allow Uprise to give financial advice. However, it has no plans to move into having custody of assets and following the typical route of ‘robo adviser’.
“We want to be that layer that’s on top of all the various financial products out there to help you like make sense of which robo advisor should be used or which banks should you use and to help you make those decisions,” she said.
According to Chen, the financial plans will be free but a potential subscription model will more than likely follow, which will offer more direct customer support. In addition to this premium subscription, Uprise will monetise through commissions on on financial products.
“We have not turned this on yet but the key thing before we do is to make sure that the side of the house that does any partnership deals with financial institutions is not talking to the side of the house that makes recommendations. The most important thing to us is our customer trust, to make sure that we’re completely unbiased when we make the recommendations for them,” she added.
‘Robinhood, Cash App, and Stripe execs launch Gen Z digital ‘family office‘- altfi
