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Project Overview
Acorns is a new mobile app that invests spare change from everyday purchases into a diversified portfolio of index funds. A team of financial experts automatically diversifies and rebalances the customer’s holdings using funds from the world’s largest fund managers: Vanguard, Blackrock, and PIMCO. In addition to connecting with almost any bank account or credit card to invest spare change, customers can deposit or withdraw any amount at any time with no commissions or minimum account balances. Acorns makes it easy to get started anytime, anywhere, with any amount of money.
Project Commissioner
Project Creator
Team
Jeffrey Cruttenden cofounded Acorns to simplify investing and connect it to everyday life. An investor throughout his high school and college career, Jeff noticed that many of his peers that had an interest in investing either couldn't come up with a lump sum to meet minimum balance requirements or were discouraged by expensive commissions and investment choices. In his capacity at Acorns, Jeff brings his background in equity research and financial mathematics to oversee and set up the portfolio game rules, application design, payments and aggregation solutions, as well as the development and structure of the investment company subsidiaries. Jeff received his BA in Mathematics magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Lewis & Clark College. Jeff serves as Acorns COO.
David Keegan leads the design team at Acorns and has over 10 years of experience in designing and developing applications for a wide array of industries such as feature films, video games, medical technology, and now mobile and web applications.
Project Brief
Acorns brings investing to the masses. Great consideration was taken to make registration as streamlined as possible and to present just enough information to the user about their account to educate them about investing without overwhelming them with data. This is exemplified in the portfolio screen where we give the user a glimpse into their projected future returns with Acorns. We used modern gestural interactions to bring life to the commonly static and boring graphs found in most investment programs. By allowing the user to manipulate multiple axis of data to experiment with different monthly contributions and projected returns for a portfolio allocation we attempted to bring understanding and enlightenment to our users. This simplified view into a user’s projected returns required numerous custom drawn controls and billions of simulation calculations.
Registration was another area of intense iteration and refinement. Both from a technology and UI/UX standpoint to make the process was as streamlined as possible to give the user the absolutely best signup experience possible. During registration the user is creating their investment account, which requires everything from bank login credentials, a full personal information profile, financial goals, and even their social security number. Numerous rounds of user testing was used to craft the registration process and remove all hurtles that arose. The conversion results have astonished even us. It’s a rare thing to have users reach out on social media about how good a registration process is, but numerous users have done just that!
Project Need
There are more than 100 million Americans who fear they aren't saving enough for retirement, and a whopping 64% of Americans couldn't handle an emergency expense of $1,000 or more without borrowing money. The investment opportunities on the market today are myriad, but most of the managed funds require an initial investment of $1,000 or more. Even if most Americans could afford this initial hurdle, the number of investment options available are so large that many beginning or hopeful investors fail to make any decision at all. Thanks to compound growth, beginning early is one of the biggest factors when it comes to successful saving, but high minimum account balances, recurring commissions, and a large menu of choices make it difficult for people to get started.
Acorns removes all the friction from the process of investing, whether the customer has never invested or they've traded every day. With no minimum account balance, a person can get started no matter how much they have ready to set aside. Acorns will help them automatically build wealth without changing their everyday behaviors, and individuals who want to invest more quickly can set up automatic recurring deposits of any size. By removing the confusing parts of investing like stock symbols, order types, margin accounts, or derivatives, customers can transact entirely in cash while Acorns takes care of the complicated bits. For an entire year’s worth of management at Acorns, customers pay less than traditional firms charge for just two trades.
User Experience
Customers get started with Acorns in minutes using only a few pieces of information. After creating an account, a customer selects their bank, enters their online login credentials, and answers their bank's security questions. This connects the account's credit and debit cards to the Acorns system, and allows the user to make deposits or withdraw to and from the associated checking account. After a few short questions about identity and financial health, Acorns can verify the customer's identity and provide personalized financial advice. The customer receives a portfolio recommendation complete with interactive estimated future value calculator, portfolio breakdown, and detailed information about portfolio holdings. A customer can accept the recommendation, or choose a more or less aggressive investment strategy. Then they can make their first investments!
Customers can choose to automate their experience or return to monitor their spending and investing closely. On any given day, customers will see their new spending transactions, the total round-ups they've saved to date, the performance of their portfolio including individual funds, and any dividends or account credits and rebates they may have received. With both manual and automatic options, it's easy for customers to control their investments and saving habits. They can withdraw any amount at any time with no penalties, so funds are available and highly liquid. Over the past two years, Acorns built a fully functioning financial institution and platform. The emphasis has always been on simplicity, ease of use, economy, and beauty.
Project Marketing
Acorns marketing strategy focuses on organic growth from word of mouth, authority-building from public relations, and paid performance traffic through digital advertising. Focusing intensely on the user experience has led our customers to become champions of the Acorns product and brand: after asking our email list to refer their friends, our numbers quintupled almost overnight and the hashtag #GetInvested started trending immediately. A gated beta program allowed us to ensure the best possible experience for our customers as we deliberately grew the scale of our operations. To date we have more than 30,000 fans on Facebook and a substantial following on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram.
For a new financial company building authority can be a challenge, but the presence of our CEO, industry-veteran Walter Cruttenden, founder of E*trade's investment bank, and our adviser Dr. Harry Markowitz, Nobel Prize winning economist and author of Modern Portfolio Theory, has made it possible to establish Acorns as a leader in finance and a reliable hand to trust with the care of your investments. Dedicated features in outlets like Mashable, Bloomberg TV, and USAToday drove hundreds of thousands of visitors to our website searching for our app. All of this is supported by a paid performance strategy to make sure that Acorns can stay top-of-mind and penetrate to new audiences. Traditional firms can pay such exorbitant fees as $14 per click, while Acorns can boast far reduced costs against competitors.
Project Privacy
Acorns has been awarded TRUSTe's Privacy Seal signifying that this privacy policy and practices have been reviewed by TRUSTe for compliance with TRUSTe's program requirements including transparency, accountability and choice regarding the collection and use of personal information. Acorns is committed to maintaining the con?dentiality, integrity and security of any personal information about Acorns customers. Acorns stresses its privacy and security standards to guard against identity theft and provide security for personal information. Acorns regularly re-evaluates its privacy and security policies and adapts them as necessary to deal with new challenges. Simply put, Acorns does not and will not sell or rent personal information to anyone, for any reason, at any time. When customers enter sensitive information, such as a credit card number or ?nancial information, on Acorns forms, Acorns encrypts the transmission of that information using secure socket layer technology (SSL). Acorns follows generally accepted standards to protect the personal information submitted to Acorns, both during transmission and once Acorns receives it.
Financial Information & Tools
This category relates to applications that provide financial information and tools.
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