We wanted to take a moment to introduce you to Lasso: our brand new social financial planning app that connects consumers with financial advisors who can help them reach their life goals.
At GoalBased Investors—the company behind Lasso—we use technology to help approach financial problems in new and better ways. We believe that new digital experiences in the fintech space should facilitate better types of conversations and leave people with a deeper understanding of the problems they face.
That’s our goal with Lasso: to create better connections and processes in the financial planning space. The Lasso app helps consumers develop a basic understanding of financial planning through experimentation so they can then leverage that new understanding to help them find good advice.
So what’s with the name? Why “Lasso”?
Lasso reflects our threefold purpose: to help people focus on a goal, gather communities together and harness the power of financial advice.
In this post, we will walk you through why these three ideas are so important to us, and to the financial world.
Focusing on a Goal
People invest because they have a financial goal. Whether that goal is short or long term, specific or more general, big or small—whatever it is—goals are the motivating factor behind all of our saving and investing.
More than 2/3 of Americans say they have specific goals in mind for the next 5-10 years. The most effective framework to help them get where they want to go will be built on a goal-oriented foundation that ensures they are heading in the right direction.
For the other 1/3 of Americans who may not be sure how to set their goals—or what their goals even are—it is important to have solutions that help them get to those answers.
The Lasso plan-building process is low pressure, incredibly simple, and results in cocktail-napkin-like plans that you can throw away if you don’t like them and start over in a matter of seconds. Or, you can easily keep iterating on them until you back into what your goal can or should be.
Whether you already know what your goals are or not, Lasso is built to help you focus in on them.
Gathering Communities in Finance
Getting the results you want is pretty much always easier with help, so we wondered how we could build a community of peers and experts that could serve as a resource of solutions and insights for everyone.
The obvious interaction in Lasso is between consumers and advisors—connecting goal-oriented consumers with plan-minded advisors.
But helpful connections don’t just happen between groups. We believe the community within each group can provide beneficial insights.
Investors want to know if what they are doing is right. Are they building the right plans? Are they building them the right way? Do they have the right goals? What is everyone else doing?
Likewise, advisors want to see what is working for their peers. What are other advisors doing? What types of clients are they working with? How can one advisor’s actions inform how others conduct business?
In Lasso, Investors build plans and can share them. Advisors view plans and can propose improvements to them.
All of this is done without revealing the particulars of anyone’s financial situation thanks to the use of points instead of dollars.
Financial information in the shared versions of both plans and proposals is expressed as points in a game, not as dollar values. You can see how many points someone else has in their plan without knowing how it translates into actual money.
Harnessing the Power of Financial Advice
Education shouldn’t be a prerequisite for anyone to start to engage with their own money. Yet the complexity of something as common as a 401(k) or IRA can leave the average consumer feeling like they don’t even know how much money they have—almost like they need to take a Finance 101 course before they can start really saving.
Nerves, anxiety and shame effectively serve as moats around productive conversations about their finances, keeping people from connecting with good advice. In order to bridge the gap, people are typically asked to divulge lots of sensitive information, make predictions about their future, attend multiple meetings and read through dense reports.
With Lasso, our goal is to eliminate barriers. 
First, let’s lower the information requirements. No more bank logins and Social Security numbers just to get started.
Then, let’s increase accessibility by putting the whole thing in a familiar format on their phone, on their own time, wherever they happen to be.
Finally, let’s let them share information anonymously with advisors for quick and easy feedback on how it could be better, thus creating a situation where consumers and advisors can ensure they’re on the same page before entering the full information-gathering process.
Ultimately, we should be creating intuitive, accessible experiences rather than creating barriers that prevent people from engaging in the financial world. And that is our goal at Lasso: To help everyone focus on their goals, gather a community of like-minded peers and professionals, and harness the power of financial advice in helping reach those goals.
Are you ready to get started with Lasso, the financial planning app? Click here to download Lasso