Yours in Finance: Laurel Taylor

The same questions asked of the people shaping the future of banking and fintech.

Welcome to Yours in Finance, where we are tracking how banking is changing. Once again. Laurel Taylor responds to our questionnaire: “We’re always going to have problems to solve. We want those problems to be higher quality over time.”

About Laurel

Laurel Taylor is the CEO and founder of Candidly. Laurel previously led a global business unit at Google and holds her MBA from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with an undergraduate degree from Texas State University. Laurel has experienced the impact of missing out on decades of compounding interest on wealth while paying down debt, between her and her highly educated mother. She is a subject matter expert on the interplay between student debt, savings, and retirement savings and has been a key contributor on The Hill, successfully advocating for legislation such as the CARES Act and SECURE 2.0.

Q&A

The interview is edited for brevity and clarity.

What's difficult about managing money?

What's difficult about managing money acutely depends upon where the consumer falls within financial health and wellness and that spectrum is so broad. Managing money when someone is in a really difficult position of just trying to make ends meet, which unfortunately is most of America, to the 1% who are really optimizing to solve different problems. So, I think it depends on the quality of the problem that the consumer is working to solve, and one of the things that we talk about within Candidly is we're always going to have problems to solve. We want those problems to be higher quality over time.

Banks serve that full spectrum of financial wellness. In the old world of static product pages built for the masses, there was generic content, kind of one size fits all, and the expression of interest in a product and a solution was finding it and then measuring click-through rates and conversion rates. Today, we have a much more flexible canvas that banks can use because of the agentic era and AI era that we're in now.

What do you like about digital banking?

What I love about digital banking and the financial services industry right now is that there has never been a time where we can generate more impact in improved financial outcomes based on the scale that digital delivers but in a personalized experience. Digital done well now means the consumer has a deeply personalized experience that is judgment free, that gives them the solution and the answers and the guidance that they're looking for, ideally with the financial institution they already trust but are now better served by.

What financial habit or behavior are you unwilling to automate?

Our philosophy as a firm is that the ultimate transaction where a financial event occurs must require user permission before that action occurs.

Whether it's investing, whether it's fractional investing, whether it's opening an account or completing a transaction, the automation of that experience is already here in some areas of the financial services experience, but ultimately, I'm not comfortable with agents taking that final action without the user saying, ‘yep, I'm ready to do it, complete the transaction for me.’

What's a financial decision you'd be happy to outsource to an AI agent?

One is holistic guidance. There is this extreme fragmentation in the industry and siloed product offerings associated with that fragmentation. For example, a bank is where I have my checking account and every bank wants to increase that lifetime value by offering multiple services and solutions. But I may think about that bank only in the way that I thought about them when I opened up my checking account with them, and for whatever reason, I go to JPMorgan for a mortgage, and I go to Capital One over here for this and I go to E*Trade for that and so the ability to unlock holistic guidance and automate that.

The 99% don't have a financial advisor. No one is doing that for them.

What earns the right to be someone's primary financial relationship?

I don't believe that the consumer has increased the bar to the bank having to know everything about me. I do think that they have an expectation that you can see the things that banks already house internally and make that meaningful to me in a way that is smart and clever and delivers insights in behaviors that I can change or money that I'm leaving on the table. For example, most consumers don't know that HSAs have triple tax advantage benefits. I mean that's just one example [that a bank could highlight].

OpenAI’s release of the personal finance experience is an enormous shot across the bow to all banks, credit unions, retail banks, institutions, the institutional sector around this divergence in digital experience. The website or “portal” is done. It’s the divergence in digital experience between the [AI] frontier labs and more of the traditional incumbents. In order to earn the right to retain the customer you have and to continue to grow market share and share of wallet, this is fundamental. Never before have banks had a competitor who's raising hundreds of billions of dollars and releasing experiences, and on top of that, is developing relationships at the enterprise level.

How do you define a bank?

I think about a bank from a regulatory perspective because the regulation applied to a bank is so intense.

So, I think consumers define a bank as a relationship they have that is trusted, that's elegant, easy with access to their funds, and ideally, an institution that enables them to build wellness and wealth.

What's the last thing you bought that you're still thinking about?

I took my niece on a little weekend getaway. It's the first time that we've gone on vacation together, just the two of us. And it was over the weekend and on Monday and Tuesday. I took her to Mexico. It was so fun. She's 15 and a half, and she's such a blast, and such a fun age,  and I was kind of nervous going into it actually. I was thinking, ‘Oh my gosh, it's going to be five days. I hope she has a great time.”

That was an investment to take her on vacation, and what I think about are the memories that we created together in that time. So, it wasn't a physical thing that I bought, but it was an investment in our relationship, a pathway to joy that we experienced together.