When You Need More Than a Money App

Welcome to Money Isn’t Everything. I’m Mary Wisniewski, Cornerstone Advisors editor-at-large and host of the show that explores early-stage ideas that could, if not already, shake up financial services.

On the show today is Sam Lewis, who’s the CEO of Fruitful, a company that offers consumers financial memberships designed to improve their personal finances.

We talk about why his digital company connects people to human guides, explore his business model, and also get into why he doesn’t think TikTok is a place for personal finance advice.

Here’s our conversation.

Sam, welcome to Money Isn’t Everything.

It’s wonderful to see you again.

You as well.

Thank you so much for having me.

I’m so excited to be here.

Yeah.

There are so many things to mine your brain about, but I wanted to start up top with, clearly everyone’s talking about GenAI.

But with Fruitful, it’s interesting because you literally have the human touch.

You connect people with guides.

You offer phone support.

So I thought, let’s set up this conversation by talking about how you view digital with humans.

Of course.

I think people want people, and the way we view leveraging AI is they’re not opposing forces.

We see that too much of this conversation can be black and white, where it’s, oh, AI can do so many things, and it absolutely can.

But when you look at the average American, there’s very little understanding of just what to do with your money and how to do those things.

Taking a step back, if you look at the traditional financial advisory space and how we’re trying to upend that at Fruitful, the traditional financial advisory space is all human.

It’s all in-person, meeting in an office.

People who have millions of dollars talking to people who are collecting fees.

We’re trying to turn that on its head and help people who are in their 20s, 30s and 40s who are making, you know, $100K, $200K, $300K a year.

The way we think you should do that is not through everything being automated.

It’s automating the right pieces.

I think there needs to be an evolution in how people think about their money, how people are interacting with their money.

But simply tossing a person to a bot or to a chatbot is not getting the personalized level of support that someone’s looking for.

So when we think about, there are so many things that can be automated.

How much have I spent on restaurants in the last month?

What do I need to save up to go on a trip to Italy next summer?

We’re doing that.

But when you look at the pieces that shouldn’t be automated, that need that human touch, that need the human connection, I want to buy a house.

What am I going to do?

What do I need to do that?

Is that the right financial decision?

The reason we are leveraging AI to scale on our back end and have a human talking to a human is because people want that connection.

So when a member signs up for Fruitful, they are selecting a certified financial planner to work with.

They choose that based on the connection they’re really building with them because money is one of those last taboo topics.

It’s one of those last things that people are like, just tell me what it is.

I need to have that inherent trust.

Then we’re using AI to scale so many things on the back end.

We’ve gone from things that can take five hours to manually put together, here’s what someone should be doing with their money, and we can do it in five minutes.

That part should be done through technology.

But the part of, here’s what we think you should do with your money.

What do you think about it?

How do you feel about it?

That part is inherently human on both ends.

I think the only way someone can really take action and feel comfortable with committing to, this is what I’m going to do with my money, you need to have a little bit of that human interaction still in the loop.

Yeah.

I want to get more into the efficiency side that you just alluded to too.

But with the human side, I did take the quiz, who do you match with?

I think it’s really compelling, your short videos of meeting the guides.

That’s not something you usually would encounter in connecting with a financial advisor.

I’m kind of curious how you sort of drum that up.

A big part of it is just being core to our brand, which is being genuine and transparent.

So when a member comes to sign up for Fruitful, they go to our website and you immediately see, this is how much you pay, 48 bucks a month, and this is exactly what you get.

That is the opposite of what you’d see with a traditional financial advisor or a traditional bank, where a lot of the ways those places are making money is on the investment side.

It’s 1% to 2% management fees of your portfolios, or it’s we’re going to sell you products, or you have to dig really deep in someone’s disclosures to understand how much they’re charging you.

For us, it’s about people in their 20s, 30s and 40s demanding transparency, being genuine, and just tell me what it’s going to be.

I will commit, and I don’t want to waste my time on something that feels icky.

A big part of that is demonstrating that we are human.

We started with, way, way, way back when, two years ago when we were just getting going, someone would sign up and they’d just talk to a person to understand what Fruitful is.

Because we knew that for someone to take a leap on, I want to have my money and approach it in a different way, and have Fruitful be my financial home, you need to have that human connection.

We’ve been able to productize that a lot more through the videos.

You log on, you are answering a couple questions, you’re matched with a certain number of our guides as choices, and you can select who you think you connect best with.

Then they’re your partner in this.

One of our guides refers to themselves as your financial best friend.

They’re there to make you feel comfortable.

In a lot of my friend group and in others before Fruitful, people would be like, I’m having money things.

I need to figure out my investments, or I’m saving up to pay off my student loans.

You go to the friend who you are like, oh, they know about money.

I’ll go talk to them.

They have no idea about you and your personal situation.

Just as a chatbot needs a ton of information to really get into the personal side of things.

But with Fruitful, you’re able to be that financial best friend.

You’re able to make that connection, and then through the technology side really scale up what you’re able to do and how fast you’re able to get there.

I would say, at least the evidence from the videos seems like these are really upbeat personalities.

Is that part of how you hire the guides?

We have guides from all different types of backgrounds, all different levels of experience.

Guides who have been at Morgan Stanley, Schwab, private wealth management, all number of other places.

Where we really look is we want, when someone’s signing up, to see themselves in one of our guides.

So they can be sharing their experience.

They can be really grasping the attention because also, money is the type of thing where people might say, “Oh, this is starting to get hard. I’m going to set this aside, and I’m going to just let things be as they are.”

That’s how people get into harder spirals.

That’s why people don’t stick to budgets.

But we really see with our guides, they’re able to establish connections and build that rapport and relationship in such great ways that, married with our technology, it helps our members stick to the money system that we’re building for them.

Because inherently, that’s what we’re doing, building a money system that enables someone to stick to it and take action on what their finances need.

Yeah.

You bring me back.

I worked at Bankrate for a bit, and they ran an experiment where they were connecting people who wanted coaching calls.

Separately, we filmed courses on personal finance.

So I was a savings instructor.

But it was so funny when I test-called the coach.

They sent me a link, but it was a link to my own course.

That’s how you knew it was good.

I was like, oh, this person.

But just because it is really hard to motivate people to stick to something.

Remove the obstacles that hit people all the time.

Even if you’re having a really charmed life at the moment, it is very hard to stick to it.

Sam, I wanted to get into also the phone support because I do think that sets you apart from a lot of fintech.

It’s something that one doesn’t think they need until it’s like, ooh, I have a little issue and now I want to talk to someone.

So I’m kind of curious how you think about the phone.

Our support, we don’t call it our customer support team, and we refer to our customers as our members because we’re trying to set ourselves apart.

Our customer support team, we call it hospitality because that’s truly what they’re providing.

We’re asking our members to bring their entire financial life into Fruitful and to trust us to be their financial home.

Too often we’ve seen, whether it’s large banks and financial institutions or neobanks and other fintechs, where you can get really good technology but no human touch.

We just had this the other day where a member had their card in their Fruitful account declined at a place, and they needed to make a payment and they were confused about why it wasn’t going through.

We were just able to get them on the phone immediately and walk them through it and fix that.

Oh, it was just actually entering the wrong address, and you’re able to just get there and go.

Yeah.

It happens.

I spent a big part of my life prior to Fruitful at a startup that got acquired by Mastercard.

But I worked really closely with big banks like Citi, USAA, Capital One, and looked at different breaking points in their customer lifecycle.

If you have someone who has a declined transaction, the reduction in their spend is dramatic and noticeable compared to people who don’t.

There are so many things you can do.

We’re relying on technology to flag these things to us, take care of a lot in the back end.

But talking with a human builds such a deep level of trust and gains such an effect through hospitality, and is a big reason why we are a membership.

It provides that transparency.

It provides that approach of, we are genuine and you can count on us.

For someone paying $48 a month, we need to be able to provide that experience.

Based on our thousands of members across all 50 states, we think we’re making some headway.

A long way to go, but we’re getting there.

Well, you just mentioned the business model, and I think it’s really important.

I think in the last handful of years, there was a pendulum that swung that said, oh, it’s better for a fintech company to charge something that’s very clear what it is per month rather than, I guess, the worst case would be, well, no, there are plenty of worst cases, but one bad case would be the tipping model.

The tipping, the VCs.

A nuts one.

Yeah.

So that’s an example of something not good for the consumer.

But you’re charging monthly, and it’s very set.

This business model of fintech and banking is so center stage right now because of Chase planning to charge data aggregators for access to their bank API.

I guess I’m really curious.

You’re collecting all the data of your members.

Are you worried about this issue?

Is it going to affect the price you’re charging?

What are you hearing from the data aggregators, or how do you feel about this in general?

Yeah.

I’m not surprised Chase is out here and is going to start charging this.

They have the market power to do this.

I personally think everyone should have access to their own financial data.

When I was in my prior life at Mastercard, I did a lot of work with issuers in Europe.

Completely different dynamic and approach to open banking.

It’s spurred a lot of innovation on different things.

It’s just not where the U.S. is, and it’s not where the U.S. is going to be.

But for Fruitful, I’m not worried at all because we own the payment rails.

What we’ve really started to see is it breaks if you don’t own it.

What we are fundamentally here to do is we will give you the advice on what to do with your money, help you understand what is happening with your money, and then give you the ability to take action on it, whether that’s through day-to-day spend or investments or savings.

We are tying all those things together.

Whereas the fundamental problem that we’ve seen in fintech in the past number of years has been that lack of actionability.

There are great personal financial management things out there telling you, hey, here’s what happened to your money, and we’re going to visualize that really well.

But it’s not a financial home because it’s not letting you take action on it.

When we look at data aggregation and bringing in data from other providers, when a member signs up for Fruitful, we will ask in a really straightforward way, where are you currently banking?

Where are your investments?

We try to make that as easy as possible.

We’re bringing a lot of that data in, but ultimately that’s a service to a member adopting Fruitful as their financial home and bringing their direct deposit into Fruitful because we’re giving them a much better experience.

That experience is what we call our Money Map, which is making it extremely clear to a member.

Here are your bills and what your musts are every single month.

Here are your goals that you’re saving up for, everything from a trip to saving for a house to paying off loans.

Then here’s your free to spend, what you should just be able to go out to dinner, go to a sporting event, anything day to day, where you just know you’re going to be okay.

Then the most important part is just making that super straightforward and easy so that when your money, your income, is coming in, it automatically is dispersing.

We’re orchestrating all that into all the different accounts you’re setting up with Fruitful so that you don’t need to think as much about this.

We really need to own those payment rails so that our members can take action in a very clear and defined way versus a lot that’s out there is trying to connect the pieces between tons of different providers.

That’s just where things break and get lost.

Ultimately, we have the ownership of where that’s going.

I don’t think something that sits a layer above that and is just trying to aggregate is going to be as successful in helping consumers take action on what’s stressing them out all the time.

You’re bringing up the issue of how I think it would be largely considered that personal financial management tools largely failed 10 years ago.

By that I mean the concept of Mint or banks and credit unions putting that kind of functionality on their website.

Adoption was always low, and it didn’t work out that well.

You said it on another podcast, and this is the “That’s What You Said.”

It was, “First and foremost, it’s not about the $7 cup of coffee.”

It’s not.

I think I even said $9 cup of coffee.

So the price keeps going higher.

It does keep going higher.

I’m like, wow, that was...

So there are two things I want to unpack there.

But now that we’re talking about the coffee, let’s talk about the coffee.

Hopefully that was just a moment in time where personal financial experts were saying, “Oh, you’re poor because you’re buying coffee, and this is how the math works.”

I think your point was, it’s the larger recurring expenses.

That’s the thing you’ve got to knock down to actually have an impact.

Tell me more about this line of thinking and why you think experts were just being so critical of someone’s coffee habits, or it was just an illustrative way to say, hey, this is how money is thrown into a garbage can.

Yeah.

It’s the big blocks that matter in someone’s financial life.

That’s why we try to simplify these things as much as possible.

In the traditional financial advisory world, things are intentionally made to be complex so that people will think they can’t do it on their own or that it can’t be done in a lower-cost way.

One of our guides was previously with Morgan Stanley, and we’ve talked a lot about this.

Yeah, we were pushed to make things sound really complex even when things were simple because people are paying a lot of money.

If you’re paying 2% of your investments, you want things to sound like, oh, I’m getting this most specialized thing here that no one else can figure out.

Instead, our perspective is we want to simplify this as much as possible.

It’s about the big blocks, and then we want to establish this money system for you where you don’t need to be thinking about this every day.

You don’t need to be thinking about that $9 cup of coffee because when you go to spend on it, you know that your free-to-spend for that month, that you’ve set up with your Fruitful guide and through the Fruitful technology, you’re doing great.

You can just check that number every couple days or a week, and you’re doing totally fine.

Then you’re saving up for your bigger goals, for those bigger blocks.

Really, to me, financial freedom is a very personal concept.

It’s not the same for each and every person.

I think a huge part of it for a lot of people, though, is, can I just live my life?

Can I go do things and not have to think about every single purchase?

That’s what we try to enable folks to do by building this money system for them.

They know the big things are taken care of, and they know that their day-to-day, they don’t have to sweat.

We don’t want someone in the Fruitful app every minute of the day.

We don’t want them thinking about their money all the time.

We haven’t done our job if they are.

Instead, we want to establish this money system for them where they are having their direct deposit come in.

It’s automatically dispersing into the different accounts we’ve set up for them in a very easy way.

Then they can just go on living their life.

Ultimately, being able to do that with speed is the most important part of what we do because when someone’s coming to Fruitful, it’s usually an action-setting event of, I want to combine finances with a partner, or I’m about to have kids, or I want to buy a house.

Then they start to see, oh yeah, I’m pulling back all the different layers in my financial life.

I can do so much here, but I have a job.

I have kids.

I have a life I want to live.

I don’t want to become the expert of this.

I don’t want to spend dozens of hours every week on YouTube.

I don’t want to spend all this time manually moving money around.

That’s what we’re here for.

It’s to take something that a lot of people have said, this is the most complex thing out there, and we’re saying, actually, we can make this really simple for you.

Our secret sauce is the orchestration and implementation of that, and just making it really approachable and well-designed so that it’s straightforward and you don’t have to think about your money all the time.

You’re speaking to, again, you have the human touch too.

But I know a handful of years ago, and it’s definitely come back because of GenAI, is this self-driving money idea of just like, hey, boom, everything that should happen is happening with your money.

I’m kind of curious of your take because Ethan Bloch founded Digit.

He told me this was more than a year ago at this point, but he was so excited about GenAI because he’s like, oh, I can actually do things that I perhaps was unable to do before, or at least do it faster.

I’m kind of curious how you think about the opportunity for this idea of self-driving money with GenAI blowing up.

It’s what we’re doing today.

When we were first starting out, right around the time where we started to see GenAI really start to be everywhere and people experimenting with it, we would see that our guides, when they were doing things manually, could take five or six hours to build a roadmap for what a member should do with their money.

Now we’re able to do that in just a few minutes.

Doing all different things from bringing in transcripts from a live conversation, to being able to easily identify, here are the goals you have and here’s where we’re going to start saving up for them, or bringing in all the different data that’s out there, to then building this money system where you just have to click a single button and it implements all of your accounts.

That’s just not possible if you were doing those things manually.

The very old-school method of, I’m going to put cash in different envelopes, works for people if they can actually have a money system.

That’s not where people are today.

But we’ve really tried to productize that concept, and everything running underneath it is making us so much faster through AI.

I think where we’ve seen a lot of news is people around, oh, I’m going to use AI to tell me what stocks I should invest in.

I think that is much more of a symptom of everyone is thinking about asset allocation.

That’s where the money is today.

That’s where all the traditional financial advisories are.

They’re clipping 2% fees.

It’s all about, even going to the same folks that we’re talking to and saying, hey, rich people invest in alts.

You need to invest in crypto and private equity and all these things.

That’s how people get rich.

When really what we’ve seen from our members, what they care about and what’s stressing them out, is income allocation.

What’s happening with my money on a day-to-day basis?

Can I be achieving the goals that I’m laying out?

The technology we’re building helps us scale to be able to help that many more people versus, hey, here’s just a chatbot.

You’re on your own again.

That’s just a slightly better version of, I can go do my own research on it.

Instead, we think there’s a real market for people who want that expertise and then want the technology that helps them scale, but still has that human in the loop to build the trust in what you’re doing.

Has anything surprised you from how your members are using Fruitful or some of the issues that might have more of a through line for many of them?

Any, oh, I thought it would be this, but it’s that?

What has been striking?

It’s a great question.

The single biggest thread that we hear and we get is like, where were you four years ago?

In someone’s life, the earlier you start on something in your financials, the better it is.

Whether it’s on investments, you start compounding earlier, or if you are taking care of your student loans earlier, you’re able to pay it off.

I think we knew that it was out there, that people really struggled with the, all right, I need to just take action on this.

I need to get to the point of, I’m going to really once and for all go after my financial life.

We knew there was going to be a hump in terms of that people had to get over in order to sign up for Fruitful and do anything with that.

We’ve really been able to just make that as easy as possible by having really approachable videos of our guides, having a very approachable price point at 48 bucks a month.

You can start with a free trial.

We’ve been able to lessen the size of that hump.

I think the thing I really saw was even when all the information is put in front of you, of here’s exactly what you need to do, there could still be people who are like, “Ah, that seems like a lot of work.”

“I don’t want to do homework.”

“Can you just do this for me?”

Doing it is also just going to stress me out even more.

I don’t know.

I’m just going to set this aside.

That’s a big reason why we’ve built what we’re building, which enables you to just click a button and it sets up your whole financial life where your income is coming in and dispersing as it needs to.

Because people didn’t, we made it so much more stressful to be able to, I have to go set all these things up.

I have to move this money around.

I have to watch it.

Instead, they know that they trust that everything is going to work as it needs to, and they can just truly click a single button and have it work.

That was a big learning for us, was even with all the information right in front of someone, they’re aware of it, they know what the advice is, to take action on it, we need to make it as easy as possible.

That was a through line that over the last year really made us go in the direction we’ve been in, to be able to get someone to just click that button on their financial life in under a week.

Yeah.

The inertia is a real thing.

Sometimes the task is actually pretty simple, but perhaps it wasn’t a handful of years ago, and so it’s just in your head that way.

It’s the same thing as going to the doctor or going to the dentist.

You know you need to.

I say this knowing I need to go to the dentist at some point in the next couple weeks.

I know it’s the right thing for me.

But I have to go in.

I’ve got to make an appointment.

I’ve got to clear time in the schedule.

I’ve got to go.

I’m going to go and it’s going to work out great.

It’s going to be the right thing.

It’s proactive health.

You need to do it.

But it’s still effort you have to get over.

We really saw that with people in their financial lives.

By lessening the size of that hump that people need to get over to just take action, we’ve been able to help more and more members get to more and more success.

Sam, I’m pretty good about the appointments.

But dusting is a thing that I’m like, you know what?

Everyone should have a thing they’re lazy about.

I think that’s going to be mine since I live so close to the freeway.

There’s daily dust that I’m like, this doesn’t really do things for my creativity.

And the crazy part is, it actually takes up more mind space.

It takes up more of your brain by not doing it.

That’s true.

Ultimately it’s that task you put off, and you’re like, I could have just done this in 10 minutes and it would have been done.

We really see what we’re enabling our members to have is, it’s a financial home, but it’s more than that.

We’re giving them brain space back.

We’re giving them the ability to go do anything else.

Go live your life and know that your financial life is on autopilot, and that you have a trusted human partner and a great AI-built system to automate everything that you need.

One member of ours, this one really sticks in my head all the time, signed up for Fruitful and said, “I woke up in the middle of the night and I couldn’t fall back asleep because I was just stressing about my finances, the family, need to pay for school, for kids, all these different things.”

They said, “Now I’m working with Fruitful and I can sleep at night.”

We’re enabling someone to do that.

We’re giving them the peace of mind back to be able to sleep at night.

That, I think, is the stickiest thing possible.

Sam, I just have a couple questions left for you.

One is TikTok and personal finance advice.

You see a lot of headlines of it being terrible.

Occasionally it’s really good.

There’s definitely an opportunity for influencers to kill it there because there’s a lot of bad information.

So to be good information, that’s a wonderful thing.

But how pervasive do you think the problem is of the personal advice that’s given on TikTok?

Or maybe you don’t think of it as a problem.

Maybe there are equal parts good as bad.

There’s a lot there.

I think...

Okay, politician.

I think that I’ve talked a good bit about the really expensive traditional financial advisory or traditional banking space, how it’s so expensive and not approachable for people in their 20s and 30s and 40s.

The other end of that spectrum is low- or no-cost alternatives, things on TikTok or Instagram, or even robo-advisors that don’t offer any form of personalized advice.

In a lot of cases, influencers on TikTok or Instagram might say, “I’m an expert,” in quotes, not a fiduciary.

Most people don’t necessarily have that background.

We’ve seen, and obviously this is only a couple things, people are like, “Oh, here’s this infinite money hack,” and it’s just ATM fraud.

People gravitate to it because it’s really compelling.

But from our perspective, that’s not what people need to be able to take action on their finances.

We’re very active on Instagram and on TikTok because it’s where people are.

We want to meet our audience.

But we’re not giving that personalized financial advice there because we really think money is a very intimate topic.

People look at it and want to talk with an expert and know that they’re getting the thing that’s right for them.

That might not be the exact thing that’s right for their family member or their friend or someone else.

I think there’s a lot of good that can come about talking about these topics.

Get them out into the open.

Show that money is something that people should be thinking about and talking about.

But when it comes to giving financial advice on TikTok or Instagram, it just doesn’t pass the bar for me on what we think Gen Z, millennials are looking for and need in terms of service and transparency and trust.

Instead, it’s a lot of noise.

That’s why we think we’re firmly bringing the best of both of those worlds.

Yeah.

It’s easy to alienate people when you give broad financial advice because it’s often like you could be suggesting something that’s really out of reach for somebody, really out of reach, or you don’t know someone’s incentive to be selling something.

That’s, I think, where it really fails.

Oh yeah.

That’s a miss.

Hard transition, Sam, but where can people reach you?

And/or any final thoughts on the direction of either personal finance or fintech that you’re really super jazzed about?

Yeah.

Sam@fruitful.com.

I will reply to anything anyone sends to me.

Oh, don’t say it out loud like that, Sam.

Yeah, check us out at Fruitful.com.

You can get started for free.

We know our perspective, right, is having the human side of this means also just being a human and meeting people where they are.

Broader thoughts on fintech, there’s a lot of noise out there about a lot of things, but there are some really great companies being built.

I think Fruitful is one of them that are fighting the good fight on the side of the consumer and trying to enable people to just do better in what they’re doing and feel better in what they’re doing.

I think we’re in for a really exciting next couple years.

And last question.

What is the image on your phone’s lock screen?

It is, at this point, a seven-year-old picture of my wife and our golden retriever.

Now, talking through it, I probably need to update it to include our newborn son.

But it’s just a nice grounding way to think about what’s important.

Yeah.

No, it’s wonderful.

Well, Sam, thanks so much for joining me on Money Isn’t Everything.

It’s been a true delight to be able to, I always want to say something really awkward like, raid your brain.

So I said it.

Thank you for joining me.

Thank you for having me, Mary.

Okay.

One of my favorite through lines is Sam talking about how using Fruitful is meant to take away mental math hassles.

As he says, you don’t need to be counting every single time.

If you enjoyed today’s Money Isn’t Everything episode, make sure to hit that follow button on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, or wherever you’re listening.

I’ve got some more great conversations coming your way, and you won’t want to miss them.

Next up on the show is a really interesting conversation about why buy now, pay later is getting so much heat.

Catch you then.