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Margaret J. Hartigan, co-founder and CEO of Marstone, said that regardless of income level or assets, a person's financial life includes a handful of big expenses, like buying a home, helping family and saving for retirement. But in a financial climate that is growing more volatile by the day, people are increasingly hesitant to articulate their goals.
Hartigan says Marstone Maps is built to engage and inspire, despite the uncertainty. Instead of focusing on the market and returns, Maps puts real life goals like vacations and home renovations front and center.
She adds that Marstone wants individuals to dream big, explore and choose the goals that matter most to them.
"The platform was born out of my time as a financial advisor for 12 years at Merrill Lynch, and the importance of Maps is it allows people to kind of get their financial house in order and see all of the moving parts that they have," Hartigan told Financial Planning. "And what I realized when I was a financial advisor is that most people have the best intentions to do right by themselves and their families, but they really don't know how to get organized and create a plan."
To strip away financial barriers and ease the intimidation of creating a financial plan for the first time, Hartigan says Maps was built to have an "intentionally playful user experience." Using a timeline inspired by a New York subway map, end clients can experiment with shifting deadlines of goals to create meaningful plans that fit their lives.
Financial tips, what-if scenarios, real-time calculations of achieving goals and more make up the complete package. The easy to understand UI and high interactivity introduce an element of gamification, but Hartigan says the real heart of Maps is simulation.
"If I take this action, what is the consequence of that action and how does it affect all of my other goals," Hartigan said. "So very quickly, the interactivity (of Maps) is showing people what correlations of things are … and that's what I think the benefit is. Because I'm not sure that people are going to learn the jargon of investments or math or statistics, but they quickly realize when they see, 'oh wow. If I contribute this much more, I can go on a bigger vacation. Or I can pay the house off in this amount of time.' The power is being able to see the impact of things."
Hartigan said that Marstone is also committed to enhancing financial inclusion and financial wellness through technology. That means helping people who don't necessarily have a lot of money to invest right away, and introducing them to financial planning in a way that encourages learning.
Her hope is that over time, simply interacting with Maps on a regular basis will turn newbies into more sophisticated investors.
"When you have appealing, intuitive visual designs that actually respond based on the inputs and how you move things, the user ends up unwittingly learning. And really fast," Hartigam said. "And that is so important because then you're empowering the client to be really present on their side of the table when they do level up or have interest to talk to an advisor."
That playful design is also part of Marstone's swing at greater inclusion, along with multilingual support. Hartigtan said most American investment platforms not only require a certain amount of knowledge about investing, but also a strong understanding of the English language and financial terminology.
"When you do things in more of a design-focused fashion, then you really equal the playing field to all sorts of people," Hartigan said.
"We really feel that education is one of the most important things," she added. "How can you expose people to new opportunities? So we're finding more and more that banks, in particular community banks and credit unions, are really interested in offering wealth management now. But they also want to be able to offer it to people that wouldn't necessarily meet the financial requirements of working with an actual advisor."
And when that time comes, Hartigan believes Maps has the power to knock down a few barriers within the advisor-client relationship as well.
"What's interesting to me as a former financial advisor and in talking to a lot of other portfolio managers is that people tend to kind of hide some of their money from their financial professional," she said. "But what's nice about Maps is that the user wants to see everything in one place, and then if the user grants permission to the advisor or the bank they're working with, they are going to have a far greater picture of the client."
Maps can be used as a self-service tool or in conjunction with a financial advisor. Marstone is only offering the service through financial institutions like wealth managers, banks and credit unions, and is not going the direct-to-consumer route.
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