Mike Kane, co-founder and Master Sensei of Hedgeable.com, has found a way to combine the things Millennials love about today's technology with the importance of personal financial well-being. Mike works closely with his twin brother Matt, Hedgeable's other co-founder, Chief Ninja. Mike is the overseer of the tech side of the business, while Mike handles the business side. Together, they have created a private wealth platform for Millennials that offers prizes and rewards for investing or adding money to their savings accounts. Mike and Matt realized that their target demographic, 20 million Millennials, weren't being served by big investment companies, which have a very high minimum investment (around $10 million).
So they decided to find a way to bring personal financial services to people in their 20s and 30s who typically do private banking. They created Hedgeable, set it up so there is no minimum investment, and have been trying to disrupt the wealth management market with both mobile and digital online services that gamifies and rewards investing and saving. Hedgeable offers very customized portfolio management that appeals to their target market: socially responsible investing, income investing, bitcoin investing, and even venture capital funds, as some of their clients are involved with private tech companies. They also provide a rewards platform that offers prizes, such as Golden State Warriors or New York Yankees tickets, or even tech prizes, like a virtual reality headset, as a way to encourage people to save.
Most recently, Mike and Matt added a way for clients to look at their financial picture outside of Hedgeable. They use the Envestnet® | Yodlee® Aggregation API to look at checking, savings, and even real estate data to give clients a way to see their entire net worth on the Hedgeable platform. Hedgeable has integrated real estate holdings on top of the Envestnet | Yodlee API, such as data on Zillow's housing prices, to help contribute to that complete financial picture.
Hedgeable even has their own API to enable developers at investment firms, banks, brokerage firms, and credit card companies – to plug into their platform. Finally, Hedgeable is the only platform to offer a full suite of 401(k) and small business investment options for clients.
"If you look at America there are 35 million small businesses that don't have any kind of retirement benefit," Mike recently told us. “We make it very easy for Millennials to start saving for retirement by offering them all different kinds of retirement accounts, which you normally can't find unless you go to one of the big banks or investment firms."
Hedgable is part of our latest Ynext Incubator class, and has been attending boot camps in San Francisco – traveling from their home base in New York. If you'd like to learn about how to leverage the Envestnet | Yodlee Aggregation API, please visit the developer portal: https://developer.yodlee.com/Yodlee_API. To find out more about Ynext Incubator, a 6-month program for developers, innovators, and entrepreneurs to launch disruptive products that leverage transactional financial data, visit: https://ynext.yodlee.com/launchpad.
