Nashville's Raise Financial Unveils Solution to Help Gen Z and Millennials Grow Their Wealth With "Investment Membership" Platform

Read Time: 4 minutes

Tech Topics In This Article: Nashville startups, Fintechs

Saving for the future is a smart move, whether you're looking to grow your retirement nest egg or set aside funds for your kids’ college education. The earlier you start, the more time your money has to work for you. But the question is, where do young professionals start?

While there are many savings and investing financial technology platforms out there, a lot of them don’t necessarily meet the needs of younger people who have limited disposable income to set aside for long-term savings.

Nashville-based co-founders Wesley Belden, Patrick Cason, and the team behind Nashville-based fintech Raise Financial wanted to change that investment dynamic. The startup’s latest product, Raise Investment, is designed to help Millennials and Gen Zs reach their retirement goals faster. Users pay a monthly membership fee — an amount personalized based on the user’s historical financial data and what would be a “comfortable” amount for that person to invest monthly. That membership amount is directly correlated to how much Raise invests on that user’s behalf, giving users the benefit of compounding returns of a large, upfront investment into the S&P 500.

“As time goes on, the amount of compounding growth and returns versus your expense for getting access [to the platform] really begins to deviate and it starts to kick off this massive compounding growth in returns,” Belden added. “We give our customers access to leveraged upside, but protect them from leveraged downside.”

The pilot program launched with deploying $5,000 for 100 customers. Users can see how their money is growing through the Raise dashboard and track their savings goals over time.

At its core, the Raise team says it is building a fintech company that serves young Americans where they’re at today.

“Although the younger demographic really gets our product faster, our early adopters seem to be older Millennials,” Belden added. “Millennials have been out here trying to solve this problem. They’ve been putting $200 a month in their Wealthfront account or investing [it] in the stock market. But they're not on track for retirement…so they understand the limitations of what's currently out there in the market.”

Meet The Raise Financial Team

Belden worked in finance and consulting before jumping into startups with the marketing management software company Waffle in 2012. When he realized he wasn’t passionate about continuing to build in the social media space, he turned to a spreadsheet of potential startups he kept live and spent three months “punching holes” in each idea.

He was left with three concepts that seemed viable.

The first? Sharable college savings funds.

That was the initial product Raise brought to market. The goal of Raise Educational is to help young parents save for their kids’ college education without adding additional and immediate financial burden to them.

“Young first time parents wanted to save for college, but they had these more immediate financial needs they needed to take care of, like paying off their own student loans and saving for a down payment on a house,” he said. “[Raise is] taking that responsibility off of the parents’ shoulders, and adding it to their community.”

As an example, Belden pointed out that grandparents or family friends can put $25 or $50 into a child’s Raise Education account for a birthday present and watch it grow over time.

Today, Raise’s team is made up of Belden, CTO and co-founder Patrick Cason, operations lead Katie Parker, marketing director Michelle Pieterse, senior product manager Jack McCann, (and Raisins, the name of the vibrant pink pig on the startup’s logo, of course).

Building Fintech In Nashville

Belden recognizes that Raise is bringing a new product to market in a “highly-regulated space,” and navigating the changing fintech landscape has certainly come with its challenges.

But he credits the growing Nashville fintech ecosystem with helping Raise navigate the industry.

“From the time when we launched our college savings plan to working on this [investment] product, the FinTech space here has just absolutely ballooned in a way that is incredibly encouraging,” Belden told Hypepotamus.

Some signs of growth include Project Fintech, an industry-specific accelerator program run out of the Nashville Entrepreneur Center, and the new local chapter of This Week In Fintech.The city has also seen fintech startup successes recently, including Built Technologies, Series B startup AltoIRA, and SavvyFi.

--Featured photo from Unsplahs.