Plum's chat assistant already helps people save and invest. Plum's AI Wealth Advisor turns that into a full plan.
Pick a goal, like retirement or a house deposit. Get a monthly deposit, a portfolio allocation, and a projection, ready in minutes.
It replaces the cost and intimidation of seeing a human advisor.
Two problems:
The result: a 10 to 12% plan save rate and most of the product's potential going untapped.
Primary goal. Make plan creation a way in for people who feel shut out of financial advice. Many assume it's only for people with more money. A free, trustworthy plan inside an app they already use reaches them directly.
Secondary goal. Move plan save rate from ~12% to a 30% target. Make plans visible, not buried in chat.
People dropped off before a plan even appeared. Too many questions, confusing wording, wrong recommendations, any one was enough to end the flow.
Source: internal plan creation evaluations, qualitative reviewTested automatic vs. editable plans with 10 people. Automatic felt generic and out of their hands. Editable won. Control over deposit and target date mattered most.
Source: Wealth Plans concept test, December 2025, n=10People want reassurance, not bigger returns. Many rule themselves out. They assume advice is only for people with more money. Even past advisor clients wanted a one-off check-in, not a subscription.
Source: Financial Advisor Study, May 2026, n=345 survey plus 8 interviewsWhy: 85% never opened the advisor. It had no home beyond a buried nav spot. Now it's a suggested next action on the homepage.
Why: too many, repeated, unclear questions caused drop-off. Now capped at 3: multiple choice, type-your-own option, no sensitive data upfront.
Why: a single automatic plan felt generic and out of people's control. Now AI generates a plan in seconds, slow, balanced, or fast-track. Control stays with the user: every option opens into a plan they can edit directly, not one they're locked into.
Why: a saved plan on its own doesn't tell you if you're still on track. Now each one shows its status at a glance, on track or behind schedule. It surfaces a concrete next step when it slips. Reassurance becomes ongoing, not a one-time confirmation.
Why: no in-product fix reaches people who never see the feature. A targeted campaign drove +140% planning sessions vs. control. 85% were first-time openers.
Honest miss: adoption is still small. Only a few thousand users have a plan. Funded plans outpace saved ones: some skip saving but still complete tasks within 7 days. Plan save rate may be undercounting real impact.
There was a real gap between the vision and what we could build. We only found out how big partway through. Next time, engineers see the concept before it's final, not after.
I designed around the assumption that people want a goal-first plan. I'd test whether broader coaching is what people actually want, before building around it.
We wanted to ship too many things at once. That made it impossible to track the impact of any single decision. Next time I'd push the team to prioritise and stagger releases from the start.