In this episode of the My First Million podcast, host Sam Parr interviews Jason, the founder of a fintech startup focused on automating personal finance. Jason critiques existing personal‑finance‑manager (PFM) tools like Clarity Money, which merely present data and leave decisions to users. He envisions a future of “liquified” or “streaming” money where AI continuously optimizes every dollar in real time, eliminating the need for users to think about finances. He cites Tally’s credit‑card‑debt‑pay‑off automation as an early step, but argues that true self‑driving finance requires eliminating transfer friction and applying mathematical models that allocate funds to savings, debt repayment, and other goals automatically. Using an Alexa‑style voice‑assistant analogy, he describes rule‑based safeguards (e.g., child‑card limits, identity‑theft alerts) and a crisis‑only notification model, where the system handles routine allocations and only alerts the user when something abnormal occurs. The conversation highlights the pain point of financial stress for most people, the technical bottlenecks (slow transfers, fragmented accounts), and the potential societal impact of a frictionless, AI‑managed wallet.
Chapters
For most people, thinking about money all day long is actually not fun or exciting. And in fact, it's quite stressful. For the standard of what I want to see built, I don't believe that there's a company that is close. There's a company in the United States that's starting to think about this and doing a good job, also called Tally, where Jason, the founder, is wonderful. And it, you know, he, he was helping people, he started with credit card debt, pay off their credit card debt faster, which was the core pain point and starting automation around it. But, you know, I think I wanna like fast forward the decade ahead where we actually get to instant streaming money. You know, I call it liquified money, you're calling it streaming money, where your money can always be optimizing to the right place. And that gets pretty powerful when that begins to happen. But most importantly, not only is it powerful, it meaningfully changes the life of American families, or, you know, across— I'll tell you one thing, meaningfully.
So I've heard this idea before about basically, hey, what's the category of what you built? It's like PFM or something like that. Yeah, PFM, Personal Finance Manager. And, uh, the theory is basically you have things like Clarity Money and, uh, LearnVest and others that were basically all like, hey, we can suggest some things, we can show you some charts and analysis, but like fundamentally you, the user, make the decision. And what you're talking about is the software makes the decision, right? Self-driving, basically. Like, it's not, it's not you're sitting in your car and your car suggests to you how you should, you know, turn or change lanes. The car changes lanes because it knows where you're trying to get as your destination. And so I've heard before that, hey, what we need is for to get that, get AI basically to the point where it can actually make the decisions and optimize the money for you so that the user doesn't have to make decisions. The user says, I want, I have these financial goals for myself, this is my income coming in, here's my bills, and it basically does it. And what I've, what you added on was the reason that can't happen right now is because the transfer is too slow. But it seems like there's a middle step, which is just right now the software doesn't decide, the user decides, and most users don't want to think about that or make those decisions that most are not active with their money management, much to your chagrin, I'm sure. So is it more about software deciding versus users deciding, or is it more about liquefied money?
Um, so liquefied money matters, but then to your point, um, so I'm gonna like, I wanna answer that with a, with a visual question. When we imagine money right now, we imagine money by saying, okay, I'm gonna log into my, you know, my, uh, E-Trade account and I'm gonna stare at all my graphs and and look at things and I'm going to talk to an advisor and tell them my goals. And then like a lot of things are going to be executed. I almost think that we are thinking about the limits and the bounds of what technology offers today, as opposed to what the customer really wants. If you ask the customer what they really want, they want enough money to do what they need to do and they want everything else to be taken care of. And like for most people thinking about money all day long is actually not fun or exciting. And in fact, it's quite stressful. So imagine, and so I almost think we visualize money based on what exists, but imagine a thought exercise, and I'll use an Amazon Alexa since it literally, there's like 17 in my brother's house and he just likes to yell at me all day and he thinks it's so funny. But basically, let's use an Amazon Alexa. And imagine you could walk in your kitchen every morning and just say, you have surveillance, so you have rules that you've set around your wallet. So Has anyone broken my identity? Has anyone done anything bad or untoward? Restrictions that you put on, so like my kids' credit cards can only, you know, spend $50 a month and whatever it may be. And then you already clearly laid out goals. And it just does it for you. And so you walk in like, why do I even need to look at my money? All I care about is, are there any crises? No. Are the rules I've set up in place? So any extra money, you know, I need $400 in my savings account for checking for, you know, if I need cash, we're gonna obviously go away from cash permanently at some point. And then everything else just optimized for me. And that's math. The thing I love, you know, I am a math geek. I've always liked math growing up. I always loved it. Math is really beautiful because this isn't, you know, we're not trying to cure something, a disease that we don't— this isn't a COVID situation where we don't know that, we don't know what to do yet. We are looking for a vaccine to use that as an analogy. This is math. For every American wallet, I can mathematically tell you where their next dollar should go to save, to save them money, make their life better. And outside of them telling us what their goals are, then the math can do it and it can do it every hour or every minute. And at some point when you get there, that is better for the American wallet. And so that's the vision of that. That's literally the picture in the back of my head is like, when do we get to a place where my money is just doing what it should do at all times. And right now there's wild amounts of friction. Move it from here, put it in the savings account, sweep it into this, do this with this, pay off the credit card. To pay off your student loans, you have to make 2 payments and tell them, please pay the principal, not just the interest. Friction everywhere. And at some point it will go away, and I want to go away as fast as we can, and it will be some of my life's work to help.
You're very, uh, persuasive. I feel like I'm ready to like get behind you and say, let's go to war. You're very, you've got a very good pitch.
