1091. Insights: Can AI make us financially healthier?

**Ross Gallagher** (0:14)
Hello and welcome to Fintech Insider Insights. I am Ross Gallagher, the Head of Consulting here at 11FS. Today we're talking about financial wellness and whether we need to rethink what that actually means. For decades, improving financial wellness has largely meant improving financial literacy. Teach people to budget, teach people to save, teach people to invest, and teach people about pensions and debt.
But knowing what you should do with your money doesn't necessarily make those decisions any easier. Now, AI offers a very different proposition. Instead of simply giving us more information, AI can increasingly understand our circumstances, recommend what we should do next, and potentially take some of those decisions out of our hands entirely.
So, is the future of financial wellness really about making everybody better at managing money? Or could it be about reducing how much managing they have to do in the first place? And if AI starts making decisions for us, does that make us financially healthier, or just create a completely new set of problems? To discuss this, I'm joined by Lucy Wayment, co-founder of Wellness. Lucy, welcome back to the show. It's lovely to see you again. Maybe you would just reintroduce yourself to our listeners and tell us a little bit more about Wellness.

**Lucy Wayment** (1:28)
Sure. Thanks so much for having me on again.
As you mentioned, I'm Lucy, one of the co-founders of Wellness. We are on a mission to make regulated financial advice accessible and affordable for mid-market women. So Elle is our proprietary AI. She helps women understand their gaps with a financial score. She helps them build confidence and connects them with female advisors when the time is right. So this conversation feels very on-brand for us because we are living inside the line between AI guidance and regulated advice every day. So I'm excited to dive into talking about it.

**Ross Gallagher** (2:08)
Yeah, likewise. I mean, it's such an important topic. So it's great to have you on and sharing your first-hand experience and perspectives with us, Lucy. So thank you so much.
Next up, we have another one. Welcome back to the pod for Aditi Subbarao. Financial Services for Snowflake. Aditi, it's always great to have you on the show. How are things going both yourself and with Snowflake?

**Aditi Subbarao** (2:33)
All well. Thank you so much, Ross. Always great to be back on the show. Things have been very exciting, as you can imagine, with lots moving in the world of data and AI at Snowflake overall. I've been spending a lot of time with banks and financial services customers in actually helping them make the most of AI from an outcomes perspective.
The focus has very much been on how do you actually get meaningful outcomes, how do you explain to the AI the context of the underlying data that they're working on and that can have significant impact on the benefits that that AI can help financial services firms and also their customers achieve. So it's been a really interesting few weeks.

**Ross Gallagher** (3:18)
Yeah, I'll bet. I love you framing it in the context of outcomes, because I think there's just so much potential for improving those outcomes for those end-users as you so rightly say, and I think we're going to get into a lot of that as we move through the show. But that is our awesome panel. I think we've got a really interesting topic, so I think we should dive right in. We mentioned it at the top of the show in the intro, so I suppose starting with financial literacy seems like a reasonable place to start. I think this is maybe the little mismatch that we've seen traditionally. I think we've largely treated financial wellness as maybe an education problem. If we give people more knowledge and better tools, then they'll make better decisions. But I don't know that that's really played out how we expected. I don't know if that relationship has necessarily been that straightforward. I think we'll unpack that as we get into the show itself. But Lucy, I think it'll be an interesting place to start. Maybe just take a little temperature check.
What do you think being financially well actually means?

**Lucy Wayment** (4:39)
Yeah, it's a good question. I think it often or certainly historically would have been reduced to just, have I got enough money for the things that I need or want each month?
But that's a pretty narrow slice of bigger picture financial wellness. For us at wellness, we have this financial score and it works across six pillars. So budgeting is part of that, but it's also protection, your mortgage, your pensions, investing and legacy. And we're really trying to help people see their gaps across this full picture. And we're definitely still seeing lots of gaps. I mean, half the women we speak to have never checked their pension, nearly two-thirds have got no will and half have got no critical illness. But I think most interestingly, the average confidence score we see is 5.9 out of 10 So there's still a gap there in terms of just general confidence around financial decision making.