Money Experience

Money Experience is a financial education platform designed to teach users how their priorities and choices in life relate to money.  Other personal finance programs have often been technical and overly-focused on math, requiring expert facilitators to deliver them.  Data show that these programs have failed to effectively engage students, leaving them ill-prepared to make decisions that will impact their finances and quality of life for many years to come.  

Rather than focusing on the “how," Money Experience shows users why they should care about life’s many important decisions.  Through use of a broad-ranging, immersive life simulator, users experience first-hand the impact their decisions have on their finances and quality of life.  Though currently only in the US, a global activation of Money Experience could address the 2 in 3 adults who are financially illiterate worldwide, mitigating poor outcomes for these individuals and the communities where they live.

Nearly 2 billion people remain unbanked, more than 60 percent of the workforce is informal, and 2 in 3 adults are financially illiterate worldwide. In the US, recent studies show that 4 in 7 adults are financially illiterate, only 17% of high school students were required to take at least one semester of personal finance, and just 24% of millennials understand basic financial topics.  

Yet people's financial lives are getting more complicated, not less, with increasing numbers of financial products vying for consumers' attention.

These problems are exacerbated in lower socio-economic communities, where access and funding are scarce, or simply non-existent.  Women are heavily impacted, too:  studies show that, on average, women are far less financially literate than men.  This puts them at significant risk of financial problems, given that they generally earn less, save less, and live longer than men.

Decisions made throughout life have short and long-term consequences on a person's financial and life outcomes, but those patterns have not been explained or taught to people. These decisions include many life choices, including children, education, job-selection, location, and many others that are rarely discussed in financial literacy education.

We help people understand how money works in life.

Money Experience teaches users how their priorities and choices in life relate to money.  

Using an immersive life simulator, a user-friendly chat-style interface and an accompanying graphic novel, Money Experience lets students make choices along a simulated life arc, from high-school all the way to retirement, helping students gain perspective on how their lifestyle and financial choices will impact their futures. Along the way, a graphic novel introduces a diverse cast of relatable characters - each "ageing" along with the student - and provides emotional context around big choices in each phase of life. 

These choices are informed by the students' own life priorities, which they can set and change as they move through the simulator. The system reflects both the financial and the life priority consequences of the students' choices, which then catalyze discussions with teachers, facilitators, and family.

Money Experience’s underlying financial model powers the life simulator and uses real economic data to calculate the whole life arc of a person’s financial decisions.

Easy to access reporting allows institutions to understand their cohorts and populations from the point of view of their goals, priorities, and future life "intent".

Current Money Experience participants are typically between 13 and 24 years of age, with 65% coming from low income or underserved communities, 34% from middle income communities, and 1% coming from high income communities.  We reach these users via all the major categories involved in financial education: government organizations, educational institutions, nonprofit organizations, and financial institutions.

Our program was designed to be very broadly accessible to students of varied backgrounds, ages, and socio-economic status within the young adult range.  We present all options within the simulator only on the basis of the choices and actions that students decide on in the curriculum, with no presupposition of their specific circumstances.

In the graphic novel, the students are presented with a diverse cast of illustrated characters that span a range of race, gender and socio-economic backgrounds, in order to show that people may decide on different paths, and as a prompt to the choices the students themselves will be making in the simulator. We see these characters make hard decisions based on the opportunities they have available to them.

In the simulator, all students begin the simulator on equal footing. Each student ranks their own life priorities, and is measured in part by how their financial decisions align with those priorities.  Rather than being prescriptive, the simulator allows the student to learn by experience rather than being told what to do - a mechanism that allows students from different backgrounds and cultures to explore options more freely.

Students see the impact their individual decisions have on both their finances and their quality of life as it relates to these unique and individual priorities. The very broad set of options in educational, career, and life choices that are available for all students in the simulator also provides greater exposure to students of varied socio-economic backgrounds to choices that they may not regularly be exposed to. 

In addition to our core offering to the 15-25 age category, we also have developed a version for adults entering the workforce, and are developing a more consumer-oriented offering as well, to address demand in older age groups.

A select list of Money Experience customers and partners includes the following:

FINANCIAL INSTITUTIONS

Cambridge Savings Bank

Jeanne D'Arc Credit Union 

Canton Cooperative Bank

South Shore Bank 

CrossState Credit Union Association

Questa Credit Union 

City of Boston Credit Union 

GOVERNMENT

Commonwealth of Massachusetts / Office of Economic Empowerment

State of Maine / Department of Corrections

State of Alaska / Division of Juvenile Justice

City of Boston 

NON-PROFITS

Boys & Girls Club of Boston 

The YMCA of Greater Boston

Girls Inc. 

Boston Center for Youth & Families

Televerde Foundation 

ChildFirst Inc. 

Steps to Success 

The Gloria J. Taylor Foundation

The Unity Council

United Way of Coastal Georgia

HIGH SCHOOLS

Arlington High School

East Hartford High School

Augusta County Public Schools

Stoneridge School of Sacred Heart 

Harbor Beach High School

Norwell High School 

Pembroke High School 

Delta High School

Exeter-Milligan High School

Woodrow Wilson School

Hamilton County High School  

Westfield Public School District

Langston Hughes High School 

Scotts Valley Unified School District

St Charles Parish 

Dracut High School 

Nashua South High 

Lowell High School 

Weymouth High School 

Watertown Public Schools

COLLEGES & UNIVERSITIES

Cambridge College 

Bridgewater State University 

Northeastern University 

Massasoit Community College

Tufts University 

Georgia State University, Perimeter College: Alpharetta & Newton Campuses

Otero Junior College

CAMPS & GAP YEAR PROGRAMS 

Hockaday Summer Camp

Winterline Domain 

EMPLOYERS

Boston Children's Hospital 

State Street 

Loomis Sayles & Company, LP 

CHANNEL PARTNERS

Council for Economic Education 

Jump$tart Clearinghouse 

SHRM Marketplace 

Shortlister HR Resource Center 

Financial products and services are seeing more users all the time, thanks to their increasing availability online.  Naturally, this increased access is inextricably linked to growth in the digital economy.  The need for sound financial education has become more urgent than ever before:  while increased access is a welcome advancement, it brings with it many potential pitfalls for the financially illiterate.  Money Experience is specifically designed to broaden the way financial decisions are understood among the next generation of adults by letting users test their assumptions about the future and see how their life choices impact their wealth and well-being.

We have over 50 client communities using our product, in settings that include public high schools, community colleges, non-profit institutions, government institutions, and numerous other educational settings. Our pricing model is stable and market-appropriate, and our marketing/sales strategy is starting to be well-understood. 

Our competitive landscape is also well-understood, and we continue to displace our competition from significant customers.

Clients have often expanded the use of our product into more schools and institutions, and engagement with both students and facilitators/instructors has been proven to be excellent.

We have recently been awarded a broad patent in the US for key differentiating elements of our offering, and have been receiving increasing national industry recognition for the quality of our product.

We expect to use investment funds to expand our sales/marketing footprint, continue to develop new products to expand the market age-range of the product, and to begin to address different language/demographic needs.

Most financial education programs focus on "the how," about transactional events, e.g. how to calculate compound interest, how to create a budget, etc.  While these are important skills, focusing on these skills first misses some important steps.  Money Experience's platform exposes for users why they should care about the many important financial topics in the first place, fostering user engagement not seen in other financial education programs.  As users move through the immersive life simulator, they find out when they are likely to encounter decisions related to these topics, and they will learn what their choices are, and how it may affect their lives.

With our patented technology, the Money Experience platform takes a more personalized approach to financial education by comparing the user's decisions in the life simulator to their self-stated priorities and calculating a quality of life score. As each choice is made, the user can see how it aligns with their priorities and impacts their quality of life, as well as how it influences their finances. 

Money Experience’s underlying financial model uses real life data to calculate the whole life arc of a person’s financial decisions, including average salaries for different jobs, rents in different cities, interest rates, cost of living differences, and many other elements.  

By helping students gain perspective on how their lifestyle and financial choices will impact their futures, Money Experience makes the connection between financial wellness and a more holistic wellness in life not seen in other financial education programs.

Money Experience currently serves over 10,000 users.  With sales of our product on its current trajectory - and with additional, appropriate funding to support sales and marketing functions, as well as product development - we expect to be serving 20,000 users a year from now, and 300,000-400,000 users five years from now.

There are a number of metrics we monitor to assess our solution's progress and impact.  Total number of users is obviously a significant measurement, as is the growth of this number over time.  We currently serve over 10,000 users.

Another significant indicator is the type of customer and partner with whom we engage.  We find exponential impact through those who represent a channel to users, such as financial institutions and government.  For example, by partnering with South Shore Bank in Weymouth, MA, we are able to reach students in 9 different high schools- as well as a community college- that are all located within the bank's regional footprint.  Similarly, our engagement with the Massachusetts Treasury's Office of Economic Empowerment (OEE) has led to a deployment of Money Experience in over 22 community colleges statewide; this is only the beginning of a multi-year deployment of Money Experience through the OEE.  More and more, we are seeing customers and partners with access to very large user cohorts, suggestive of significant opportunities for scaling deployment of Money Experience.  

Efficacy of our program and user engagement are two more important metrics that we track.  In a case study of 800 anonymized users from the 2020-21 user pool, the results overwhelmingly demonstrated that Money Experience users show increased understanding of big financial concepts.  Likewise, feedback from participants and facilitators gathered in a survey provided at the end of the program, as well as completion rates reported in the simulator, indicate very high levels of engagement.

Nine full-time staff members, plus additional contractors in finance and legal.

Money Experience is founded and run by noted Boston tech entrepreneur Jeet Singh. An MIT alumnus, Singh brings access to expertise and deep experience in online systems, customer engagement, education and skills training and other fields, thanks to a 30-year successful history of developing businesses and systems that have been innovative in a wide range of industry areas, including one of the first e-commerce firms (ATG, Inc.) in the industry. Other firms of note started by Singh include ThirdChannel, Inc. (data analytics in retail), Kinto, Inc. (health tech helping Alzheimer’s families, which recently was awarded an NIH grant), and Winterline Global Education, a skills-oriented gap-year educational program.  Singh has lectured, spoken and taught at MIT Sloan School, MIT Entrepreneur Forum, Harvard Business School, various TED Conferences, World Economic Forum, Doors of Perception (Netherlands) and his own gap-year program, Winterline Global Education.

To make certain that product development is guided by input from our users, Money Experience runs focus groups multiple times a year and regularly incorporates feedback provided by participants, sponsors, and facilitators to ensure maximum levels of efficacy and engagement with the program. 

We hire the best people we can find for the job, with no regard to race, gender, age, or other individual factors that are irrelevant to the skills demanded.  The results of that approach, when our leadership ran a global public company (ATG) , was that the majority of the C-suite positions were held by women, including: CFO, Head of Sales/Marketing, Head of Engineering, Head of Design, VP Org, VP Business Development.  Three of these women went on to become CEOs.  Today, as another minority-owned company, Money Experience's head of marketing is a woman, head of engineering is Indian, and our CEO/founder is Indian-Indonesian.

Money Experience is applying to the Challenge to access the many benefits afforded to winners of the Challenge, but most especially for the potential access to funding and partnerships.  Now in growth stage, we have recently begun our first effort to raise external funding.  Our mission, both in product and target population, appear to align quite well with Challenge’s mandate.

In addition to funding, we would welcome access to experts and strategic advice from those supporting the Challenge.  Since inception, we have endeavored to surround ourselves by experts in fintech, education, finance, and other related fields.  We continue to build new relationships in 
an effort to strengthen our market potential, and would gladly invite the opportunity to tap deeper into the Challenge and MIT networks.

Scale in the World: For our solution to be effectively embedded into the organizations (public schools, non-profits, universities, etc.) that are necessary to bring the solution to the target end-user, the challenge is to make it easy, non-threatening, and be able to quickly show progress and engagement with their populations. Our design approach was to NOT require extensive financial expertise (if any) for our instructors, but to have them play the role of discussion leaders/facilitators, leaning on the insights provided by our extensive and easy to read reports. Make it Easy.

Outcomes: We are extremely data-driven in our approaches and extensive  experience in software in many different domains (e-commerce, retail, health-tech, education), and therefore also frustrated by a general lack of good intervention/outcome data in the educational space. We divide our data approach into: a) Effectiveness (measuring before and after student comprehension of topics, b) Usefulness (bringing aggregate cohort data back into facilitated discussions, as a key part of the learning experience, and c) Long-Term Impact (understanding how financial literacy might affect various social outcomes, wealth, education, job prospects, family, etc).

We are looking for opportunities to partner with impact investors, foundations, and government and private agencies, who can help us serve our target populations.

Using an immersive life simulator, a user-friendly chat-style interface and an accompanying graphic novel, Money Experience lets students make choices along a simulated life arc, from high-school all the way to retirement, helping them gain perspective on how their lifestyle and financial choices will impact their futures. Along the way, a graphic novel introduces a diverse cast of relatable, illustrated characters - each "ageing" along with the student - and provides emotional context around big choices in each phase of life.  The characters span a range of race, gender and socio-economic backgrounds, in order to show that people may decide on different paths, and as a prompt to the choices the students themselves will be making in the simulator.

In the simulator, all students begin on equal footing. Each student ranks their own life priorities, and is measured in part by how their financial decisions align with those priorities.  Rather than being prescriptive, the simulator allows the student to learn by experience rather than being told what to do - a mechanism that allows students from different backgrounds and cultures to explore options more freely.  The system reflects both the financial and the life priority consequences of the students' choices, which then catalyze discussions with teachers, facilitators, and family.

The very broad set of options in educational, career, and life choices that are available for all students in the simulator also provides greater exposure to students of varied socio-economic backgrounds to choices that they may not regularly be exposed to. 

Nearly 2 billion people remain unbanked, more than 60 percent of the workforce is informal, and 2 in 3 adults are financially illiterate worldwide. In the US, recent studies show that 4 in 7 adults are financially illiterate, only 17% of high school students were required to take at least one semester of personal finance, and just 24% of millennials understand basic financial topics.  

These problems are exacerbated in lower socio-economic communities, where access and funding are scarce, or simply non-existent.  Women are heavily impacted, too:  studies show that, on average, women are far less financially literate than men.  This puts them at significant risk of financial problems, given that they generally earn less, save less, and live longer than men.   

With its patented technology, the Money Experience platform is specifically designed to broaden the way financial decisions are understood among the next generation of adults by letting users test their assumptions about the future and see how their life choices impact their wealth and well-being.

Money Experience consists of a cloud-based application accessible on a standard web browser on most computers, tablets, and mobile devices with an internet connection. In addition to the main simulator product used by the student, the Money Experience client dashboard also provides online instruction materials, curricula, and robust reporting for facilitators in the hosting organization.  The client dashboard allows administrators and facilitators to set up and manage courses from their web browser and provides access to the resource center, simulator, and reporting tools. 

Nearly 2 billion people remain unbanked, more than 60 percent of the workforce is informal, and 2 in 3 adults are financially illiterate worldwide. In the US, recent studies show that 4 in 7 adults are financially illiterate, only 17% of high school students were required to take at least one semester of personal finance, and just 24% of millennials understand basic financial topics.  

These problems are exacerbated in lower socio-economic communities, where access and funding are scarce, or simply non-existent.  Women are heavily impacted, too:  studies show that, on average, women are far less financially literate than men.  This puts them at significant risk of financial problems, given that they generally earn less, save less, and live longer than men.   

With its patented technology, Money Experience is a financial education program specifically designed to broaden the way financial decisions are understood among the next generation of adults by letting users test their assumptions about the future and see how their life choices impact their wealth and well-being.  We are reaching girls and women through deployments of our program in non-profits such as Girls, Inc. and the Televerde Foundation, as well as a range of other channels including public and private middle and high schools, colleges, universities, community colleges, gap year programs, and camps.

Money Experience is a financial education program consisting of a cloud-based application accessible on a standard web browser on most computers, tablets, and mobile devices with an internet connection. In addition to the main simulator product used by the student, the Money Experience client dashboard also provides online instruction materials, curricula, and robust reporting for facilitators in the hosting organization.  The client dashboard allows administrators and facilitators to set up and manage courses from their web browser and provides access to the Money Experience resource center, simulator, and reporting tools. 

A core part of Money Experience's platform is the patented technology it incorporates.  As a user makes their way through the simulator, the avatar-guide "Tess" will ask the user to make choices related to lifestyle, finances, and personal priorities.  These choices become inputs for our platform's underlying financial model, where the user's entire life arc of decisions are created.  By comparing the user's choices with their self-stated priorities, a quality of life score is calculated. 

Money Experience’s underlying financial model uses real life data to calculate the whole life arc of a person’s financial decisions, including average salaries, rents in different cities, interest rates, cost of living, and many other elements. 

Our platform collects a wide range of anonymized user data, which we use to measure efficacy and engagement of our platform.  Facilitators and administrators can generate reports from this data, informing their conversations and instruction with students.  See our recent case study:

Money Experience - Financial Literacy Case Study

Money Experience is a financial education program consisting of a cloud-based application accessible on a standard web browser on most computers, tablets, and mobile devices with an internet connection. In addition to the main simulator product used by the student, the Money Experience client dashboard also provides online instruction materials, curricula, and robust reporting for facilitators in the hosting organization.  The client dashboard allows administrators and facilitators to set up and manage courses from their web browser and provides access to the Money Experience resource center, simulator, and reporting tools. 

A core part of Money Experience's platform is the patented technology it incorporates.  As a user makes their way through the simulator, the avatar-guide "Tess" will ask the user to make choices related to lifestyle, finances, and personal priorities.  These choices become inputs for our platform's underlying financial model, where the user's entire life arc of decisions are created.  By comparing the user's choices with their self-stated priorities, a quality of life score is calculated. 

Money Experience’s underlying financial model uses real life data to calculate the whole life arc of a person’s financial decisions, including average salaries, rents in different cities, interest rates, cost of living, and many other elements. 

Our platform collects a wide range of anonymized user data, which we use to measure efficacy and engagement of our platform.  Facilitators and administrators can generate reports from this data, informing their conversations and instruction with students.  See our recent case study:

Money Experience - Financial Literacy Case Study