NewRetirement, a digital-first financial planning platform, has changed its name to Boldin.
“We’ve changed our name to reflect our hope for our customers: That you can be financially confident enough to be bold in life, whatever that means to you,” reads the company’s updated website.
The company and site, which launched in 2015 as NewRetirement, today serves both consumers (its original audience) and enterprise partners. This week, it announced a new company name and some new product capabilities.
Topping the list of new features, Boldin has introduced a Financial Wellness Dashboard. This includes the Boldin Financial Wellness Snapshot, which is an assessment of users’ financial health measured across more than 20 metrics.
The tool analyzes each metric and grades the user, giving them a status denoted by a color; those ‘excelling’ are green, ‘progressing’ yellow, or ‘vulnerable’ red. The idea is to provide the user with a holistic view of their financial well-being.
On the short-term roadmap, the company plans to introduce a Financial Wellness Score, assigning a numerical value to the user’s financial wellness based on their selected metrics. According to the company, this can be likened to a credit score, and like those, the wellness scores can change over time as users make progress on their financial goals.
To date, more than 350,000 consumers have accessed the Boldin platform, analyzed their financial wellness or built financial plans, up from the 130,000 users who had done so when WealthManagement.com interviewed founder and CEO Stephen Chen in February 2021.
According to the company, this number has grown into millions when the clients of partners who have accessed the Boldin platform are counted.
The Consumer Model
Consumers have three choices when it comes to Boldin direct-to-consumer tools; the first is the free basic Planner service, where a user can build a personalized plan, access the site’s repository of planning-related answers to questions and try what-if planning and retirement scenarios.
Next, for an annual subscription of $120 with a 14-day free trial, users add more than a hundred additional planning inputs, get real-time net worth monitoring based on account aggregation, personalized AI-driven digital coach suggestions, additional scenario comparisons, live Q&A sessions with Boldin’s staff CFPs and paraplanners, and access to online classes, among other features.
The third choice is Boldin Advisors, where users can collaborate with a certified financial planner employee of Boldin and gain access to fee-only fiduciary expertise. This service, on average, costs $1,650 annually but depends on the level of service. With it, the user gets holistic collaborative planning, a comprehensive retirement plan review, assistance with asset allocation and asset location, and Roth conversion and withdrawals review, among other services.
Significant Independent Advisor Interest
While Boldin began life serving a direct-to-consumer market, the firm received significant interest over the last few years from advisors looking for a low-cost do-it-yourself financial and retirement planning tool they could share with clients to input their own data that was both comprehensive and intuitive but also allowed them to easily collaborate.
“For [independent] advisors, our platform acts like Google Docs, allowing them to collaborate with consumers to edit and build out their plan and scenarios. Advisors can interact with plans in Explorer Mode where their changes aren’t saved, and we also have an Edit Mode where the Advisor changes are saved. Advisors can jump on a Zoom and collaborate on a plan anytime,” Chen wrote in an email.
“We have two basic models: Advisors who use a co-branded version and have consumers build plans on Boldin.com. For this model, we get the subscription fee from the user, and the advisor gets the services revenue. There is a nominal platform fee of $150 per month per advisor here,” he wrote.
And then there are advisors who license the Boldin platform.
“In this case, pricing depends on the level of customization and number of users,” he wrote, and can vary significantly in terms of cost.
“We have 10-15 RIA firms currently using the licensed platform, and we’re working with some larger, technology-forward RIAs planning to pilot the platform,” Chen wrote.
To help build out the platform and expand its offering into the advisory world and to partners, Boldin raised $20 million in funding in March. This Series A had participation from a range of investors and was led by Allegis Capital and joined by Ulu Ventures, Nationwide Ventures, Fin Capital, Frontier Venture Capital, Cameron Ventures, Marin Sonoma Impact Ventures, Northwestern Mutual Future Ventures, Plug and Play Ventures and Motley Fool Ventures, bringing the company’s total funding to $20.8 million.
Startup financing blog TechCrunch reported in March that the company would use the capital to expand its enterprise products, scale up onboarding, accelerate R&D efforts, build capacity to meet future demand and provide Boldin three to four years of runway.
