Born from a former American diplomat who brought forward the future by reinterpreting what she saw on her travels, Wellthi, an AgeTech Collaborative™ startup participant, is a B2B embedded social finance software product modernizing the mobile banking experience through the power of social and community influence.
Combining social networking, curated content from financial experts, and simple and intuitive payment solutions, Wellthi empowers users to easily save, send and spend alongside friends, family, and the community.
Wellthi was also designed with Millennial caregivers in mind, and their Family Care Wallet helps users save and fundraise to support the long-term care of loved ones.
We recently connected with Fonta Gilliam, Wellthi’s CEO & Founder, to learn how Wellthi is actually leveraging the power of social to reimagine the mobile banking experience.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Tell us more about Wellthi.
Wellthi is a white label B2B embedded community finance app and digital wallet that can be plugged inside any mobile banking app. It's something that developed out of my experience working as an American diplomat for about 10 years. Before launching the company, the State Department sent me to work with foreign governments and banks in Asia and Africa and that's where I was exposed to social finance - a concept of community and family coming together to help people meet their financial goals.
At Wellthi, we're really passionate about how we can help banks, credit unions, financial institutions, and large organizations reimagine their mobile experience in a way that appeals to the next generation, focusing on creating a community experience and a safe space to talk about finances.
Wellthi’s Family Care Wallet is a solution designed to help users provide financial caregiving support to their aging loved ones. How exactly does it work?
After creating a Wellthi account, you set a goal around family care. You could be setting up a goal for long-term care, unexpected medical expenses, emergency savings, home costs, or even a family vacation. So it's not just the negative side of family financial caregiving. It's also the positive and aspirational.
Once you create your goal, you can set up a savings plan, track savings and expenses, create a vision board, and use the social networking features to invite family members and friends to join and support your goal. Family members can send money and allocate funds towards the goal and they can chat, post comments, videos, and engage on the social feed around their loved one’s care. It's really nice that the solution provides one location to manage and talk about your loved one’s finances.
What benefits are gained by leveraging the power of social and community influence in mobile banking?
We have designed Wellthi to be a safe space to talk about your finances with like-minded peers going through the same thing. We take this concept of social networking and online public groups, and we couple it with social feeds that are curated based upon various financial goals. So, on your Wellthi homepage, you might see a ‘Building Financial Wealth’ group. You might see a ‘Caregivers’ group. You might see a ‘50+ Entrepreneurs’ group. You find your public community, and when you jump into that community, you're able to network and engage in a safe space. These groups are moderated by experts like bank loan officers, financial advisors, and insurance agents, so they are a way for us to help people crowdsource information from trusted sources. And being a part of these groups makes people feel more comfortable and that they're not alone in managing their finances.
With the Goals feature in the Wellthi Wallets, you can leverage your personal community to crowd source contributions for elder expenses, emergencies, or unexpected healthcare costs, or whatever your goal may be. You can see what's happening with the goal group, who's contributing and who isn't, and you can use positive peer pressure to help your group meet their financial goals.
Financial caregiving can be a daunting task for many. Does Wellthi provide tools and resources to help caregivers bolster their financial literacy?
One thing that makes our community different from other social networks is that our content is moderated and cultivated by experts. These are verified, trusted advisors that are trained and licensed to give financial advice. Through Wellthi, people can build a relationship with experts to get realtime answers as opposed to having to attend a workshop or class or set up an in-person meeting at a bank branch. The app also allows you to request a free one-on-one consultation with a financial advisor, insurance agent, and other experts to help you meet your savings and financial goals.
I remember thinking, what if I could modernize this with cutting edge FinTech and actually mainstream it?
Can you tell us more about your backstory and what inspired you to create Wellthi?
Straight out of graduate school, I had the opportunity to become a young diplomat for the U.S. State Department in South Korea. Every young diplomat has to spend their first year processing visas for foreigners that want to come to the United States. It's grueling work. You're interviewing hundreds of people a day. One day, a South Korean woman walked up to my window and asked for an American visa. She was a street vendor, but she had about $100,000 in her bank account. I remember thinking, “This must be fraud. How could this lady have this type of money?” So I asked about it and she explained the concept of a “Kye” - a Korean social savings club. Her entire neighborhood had been saving for years. They all put money into a common pot and the recipient of the pot rotates. It was finally her turn after years of saving with her neighbors and family and friends, and she was taking that money to move her family to the U.S. for a better life.
I was fascinated by this concept and as I started to travel to other countries, I saw it elsewhere. In Africa, there are probably 20 translations for this concept of community finance. In Latin America, you might call it a “Tanda.” In the Middle East, you might call it a “Gam’eya.” It was shocking to me that it was so universal and ubiquitous in all these emerging markets, as well as in a lot of American immigrant communities, but it was all happening outside the formal banking system. And it was the one thing that people were using to actually save and build wealth collectively where so many other projects and programs and philanthropic efforts seem to fail. At the time, I remember thinking, what if I could modernize this with cutting edge FinTech and actually mainstream it and bring it back home to my community as a way to empower people here? And that’s how Wellthi came to be.
What are some notable challenges you’ve faced while building Wellthi, and how did you navigate them?
It's really hard to create a new category in finance and that's what Wellthi is essentially doing. We are redefining this concept of wealth building; financial planning in a very social, community-like way when historically it's been very individualistic and insular. And so that has been really tough to go and partner with these large institutions, card networks, banks, and really get them to understand a new way of banking for the new generation. And not only understand it, but accept it and adopt it. We've had to be very strategic around identifying partners and like-minded companies that understand the future of banking and open banking.
What’s next on the horizon for the Wellthi?
When I think about the future of the company, I envision a world where every American logs into their mobile banking app and they're able to access their Wellthi community. We want to be in every bank in the United States. We want to be the premier technology and community for talking about your finances and helping you manage, track and grow them with your bank partners and with your family and friends who can help keep you accountable. We're getting there through our channel partners. We have partnered with Mastercard and Discover to do this and we have some really exciting news about another partnership we’ll be announcing soon. We are actually making a great headway by partnering with these huge companies that get it, that are like-minded and that really want to offer this to the U.S. population.
Learn more about Wellthi by visiting their website.
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