Your Financial ‘Why’

Jessica Buchleitner sits down with Marla Sofer to unpack the complex narratives surrounding personal finance that begin with parentally instilled beliefs and end with a crowded financial services ecosystem often too confusing for the average consumer to navigate. Marla shares her journey to founding Knomee, a financial wellness platform that offers the tools to understand your unique financial identity, and her insights on breaking free from limiting beliefs while using money for personal growth and impact. She highlights how to take charge and leverage an important digital age tool – our personal data – to set financial goals that will lead to more fulfillment via the right advisors.

This episode explores:

• The dangers of living reactively vs. the importance of crafting a clear vision for your financial future.
• How shame narratives drive us into money-avoidant behaviors.
• How the “hedonic treadmill” creates a reactive and constant search for meaning and happiness.
• The role of personal agency and data ownership in making informed financial decisions.
• Challenging societal narratives that undermine women’s financial confidence.
• How technology can revolutionize financial services to empower individuals.
• Blocker narratives exist to make us think that we are not worthy of having something for some reason.

Jessica Buchleitner: Welcome back to Narrative Dive, where we are deep diving into the stories dominating our world. Today, Marla Sofer is joining me. She is the founder and CEO of Knomee. Marla is a financial services and FinTech executive, founder of two women’s networks, (We definitely have that in common.) driving change and inclusion in corporations. She’s a frequent speaker on topics related to the future of financial services, wealth and asset management, a startup advisor and 2020 Woman of Silicon Valley, 2021 Woman in Wealth Tech to watch and proud mom and wife. She led partnerships quantified in billions of dollars at J.P. Morgan and BlackRock before leaping into fintech in 2015 to improve customer experiences. Her experiences at Microsoft, Carta, Invesco, and LendingClub influenced her decision to create a solution that would improve personal financial wellness and enable financial services companies to better serve their customers and prospects. Marla, welcome.

Marla Sofer: Thank you, Jessica. I’m so excited to be here.

Jessica Buchleitner: Excellent. I’ve wanted to talk to you for a while after we made our introductions last year, because I’ve been tracking your progress with Knomee and I’m basically your, your target audience. It’s an excellent solution. And we’re going to dive into what it is, but what caught me and why I wanted to bring you on the show was you made a blog post with the quote, and many listeners can relate to this: “I have 40 years ahead of me and nothing to show for the 40 years behind me.”

Now that doesn’t necessarily have to be 40 years. It can be 30 years, can be 50 years. But we’ve all been in that position where we’re kind of cross comparing our lives to others or to the standard that society puts forth to us. And we start to think, wow, I need to catch up or I’m not where I should be. And then some version of shame sets in. So you go pretty in depth of this in this blog. And I’ll of course put a link to this blog in the show description below. But it’s a common narrative affecting women, especially women, who are entering what society calls “middle age.” Of course, I’m not a huge fan of the term “middle age.” But since we’re conditioned to reflect as we move ahead, why would this narrative be a dangerous place to stay?

Marla Sofer: Yeah, I think what struck me just about that is that what you said, that a lot of us feel that we’re not where we should be. the reason it’s dangerous is because nobody wants to live their life reactively. We don’t want to look at all of the things that we have done. And frankly, you can stir and think about what it is that you might have done in the past. way too often, especially for women, it stops us from thinking about the future. And what I’ve learned in interviewing hundreds of women is that we do not spend enough time thinking about our future. We don’t create clarity about what it is we want to do. I think we’re sometimes afraid and we don’t know how to answer the question, what are your goals? When we tap into that, we expose vulnerability. And that vulnerability is good. It’s not a dangerous thing. It’s an exciting thing. But it is a little bit scary. But when you get a little bit of stress and fear and anxiety, those are things to lean in on. And when you think about achieving whatever you want to achieve in your future, you take an entirely different approach to how are you maximizing the life that you’re living.

And when you ask yourself or when you say to yourself, I’m not where I should be, you’re not really stepping into that acknowledgement that we’re in this finite experience. How do we choose to embrace our future, reflect on how we would like to support and embrace authentically our values and recognize that vision of future me. So I think that it’s dangerous because it stops you from taking action. And in order to really manifest your vision of the future, it’s that mindset shift that needs to be your very first step. That mindset shift kicks you out of, “I’m not where I should be.” And kicks you into, “Where do I want to be?” so that you recognize and can put some milestones down, mile markers that you would like to achieve and start working toward those.

And it’s never too late, never ever too late. It doesn’t matter if you are any age on the planet. Everyone is inspired by those stories of people who go and get second, third degrees in their 80s and 90s because this is, as long as you’re here on this planet, you’re on a journey. And any time that you find yourself in is the right time to get started on some goal.

Jessica Buchleitner: An excellent way to flip that narrative. And you do touch on a good point that it stops you in your tracks, which is one of the reasons why I wanted to do a show about narratives, because they can hold us up. They can hold us back. I like the way you’re flipping this and your personal story of how you created your company is quite fascinating. So first tell us what is Knomee exactly?

Marla Sofer: Sure. So, Knomee helps you answer the question, is this financial product right for me? And for most people, they don’t know. It is so overwhelming to make the right financial choices. And what I think people don’t want to hear, because it’s not an easy answer, is that the true answer to that question, is this financial product right for me, is always 100 % of the time, doesn’t matter what the product is, the answer is: it depends. And what Knomee helps you do is clarify all of the things that it depends on so that you get unstuck. You can take action toward your future.

One of the most important things that it depends on is knowing what you’re aiming for. And I want to go back to what you were just saying when you think about this narrative that keeps people stuck in the past. There is somewhat recent research that has come out, just thinking about the definition of contentment. And when you define contentment and you put rails around it and say, “When I get to this particular place, I will feel content,” you are much more likely to get there and to feel content. When we think about money today, if you ask people, are your goals? The thing that comes to most people’s mind immediately, is: I want to get rich, I want more money. Or even more common: I don’t know my goals. And if your definition of, if your goal is I just want to get rich, what you learn fast enough is that you’re never going to reach it. No matter how rich you become, your goalpost will continue to be pushed further and further and further back. There’s always going to be people richer than you. And the richer you get, the richer the people surrounding you become. And so what Knomee helps you do is clearly articulate your vision of the future and understand all of the context and aspects of yourself so that you can then use that information to empower yourself as you are achieving those goals with confidence.

Jessica Buchleitner: And you had a personal story about how you arrived to create this, how you flipped the narrative. What was that story exactly?

Marla Sofer: Yeah. So it was a very scary experience for me, kind of. I took a meditation coach up on kind of a free offer for this women’s group they offered for all these women. And she encouraged me during a coaching session to get really quiet and think, kind of get into a meditative state.

And she encouraged me to consider that I now had a 75 year old me sitting next to me and looking at me and asked me to reflect on what is that version of me feeling? What is future me feeling about me right now? And I was dissatisfied and really, really ashamed. I was just horrified that future me knew that I never really stepped into my potential.

I never took the risk on myself. I never believed in myself to the extent that I knew that I wanted to. And here I was at 75, virtually through my meditation, kind of thinking, “well, now it really is too late. Now I’m never gonna have that experience.” And so I immediately stepped out of the meditation and that feeling never left me, that feeling of you know what you want to do. I had this idea for a startup. I had been hemming and hawing on it for years. I even started talking to people about it. One of those people was my daughter. And she actually said to me, “When are you going to do it?” And when you get that type of a question from the person to whom you are the example, you are the model that you want her to emulate in her life, that is jarring. So for me, it was, that was what I needed to kind of kick me into: it is my time to step into the future that I want to create for myself. No excuses, no finger pointing at anyone else or blame to be laid on anyone. I needed to kind of come into my power and recognize what it was that I needed to do in order to feel that I am living my utmost life. And that exact story is what I want to empower through Knomee.

Jessica Buchleitner: That is powerful. I think we’ve all gotten to that point before where we’re thinking, “okay, life could be different or I could be doing X, Y, Z. Why am I not doing it?” And there’s usually narratives that are holding us back from doing that, right? “I’m too old now. That chance is long gone. I should have done this when I was 20.” or I should have done this. No, it’s always the right time to do something. So that’s a powerful narrative and you’re living proof of that. And I also love that your daughter was a huge encourager of that because in many ways how I see Knomee is paving the way for better financial decisions for women her age and up and coming women who are coming into adulthood. So that’s very powerful because there’s long been this and you know this from financial services. I’ve also dabbled in financial services myself. There’s long been a narrative of you don’t get it towards women.

And we’re kind of used to it, the condescending nature of products in the past. It hasn’t even been 100 years that we’ve had access to credit systems or mortgages. So we’re still kind of figuring that out in many ways in the financial industry. So in what ways has society conditioned women to rely on others, husbands, friends, advisors, even family for financial advice and management?

What I found in our research and also, yeah, have worked in financial services for over 20 years. And I’m deeply familiar with a lot of the tools, the jargon, very, very frustrated by how the industry treats people. And what I’ve learned in speaking with hundreds of women is that it’s worse than you think. It’s not just that we’re kind of used to it. We are not accustomed to anything different. For every single woman I spoke to, what I heard is a different story, but a very similar story of condescension, of shame, of this person kind of made me realize that I’m not smart. 

And that story is heartbreaking because every single woman is so much smarter than she thinks she is. And there is this internal narrative that she’s telling herself about her capability. There was that trend around girl math and you know, female ability to get into numbers and analytics and planning and details and calculus and all of these things that we might shy away from. And it’s none of that reason. I actually, I just wanted to share this story. I have a daughter in college and a son who’s going to college this year. And I was doing some research because he’s a, he is a bit more STEM -y, you know, very science and math focused. And a lot of the best private schools in the country for STEM, for STEM education have between 60 and 70 % male students. To me, was outrageous. These are the best schools in the country. And I thought, we’re not doing well enough as a society. We’re okay with this acceptance of the narrative that is one that we should not be okay with.

Jessica, you and I of chatted a little bit about a post that I put on LinkedIn when I was listening to a Scott Galloway recording. And I love Scott Galloway. I think he’s phenomenal. But I think in this particular podcast that he did, he got it wrong. And what he was talking about is how in his marriage, he’s the one who’s good with money. And he also boasted about how his woman, his had worked at at Goldman Sachs and had these great credential jobs, has an MBA, but that he makes all of the investment decisions and that she does the spending. And that narrative is one that has permeated our society for too long, that women do the spending, maybe even the philanthropy, and men do the investing. And what bothers me more than anything is that investing is what is required for wealth accumulation. If women want to participate in that story of wealth accumulation, they have to invest. They have to recognize that that is the source of their empowerment. That is where the impact happens. When you use your money as a tool for impact, that is when you start to shift and recognize that the narrative in your head is not true and you are just as capable as anyone else of making those decisions.

Jessica Buchleitner: That’s very true. And I did mention to you when we were talking previously, I just came back to the U .S. after four and a half years of working in Germany. And I remember picking up a German textbook because while I was there, I thought, I’ll be adventurous. I’m working in an office full of Germans who are speaking German. I’m going to learn the language. And I opened the book. And one of the dialogue examples in the book was a man telling his girlfriend not to buy too many shoes and that he’s better with money than her. Well, you know what, I’ll manage the finances because you buy too many shoes. And I just, I remember slamming the book shut out of disgust thinking, my God, you know, here we are perpetuating these narratives about women being bad with money. I mean, in most of my relationships in the past, I was always the better one with money who was, you know, more organized and had everything together, but that just unfortunately was not the dominant narrative for the longest time. And so even in something like a language learning textbook, at a very simple level, this idea is reflected. So that gets into my next point, which was, we are familiar with the fact that financial services for the longest time was controlled by the suits in the corner office. Advertising had the madmen, financial services had the suits in the corner office. And a lot of what happened is products being offered to consumers were jargon filled, hard to understand. And technology has really shifted that. So how has technology paved the way for better products and financial services?

Marla Sofer: I would say access has improved, but I don’t know that we’ve gotten to better products and services. And I don’t know that we have shifted away from dramatic improvement in the use of jargon. In fact, there’s a lot of new risk that comes with access. So you think about kind of what happened with the crypto exchanges and you think about Robinhood and these kids who invested in options without really deeply understanding what they were getting into and what that turned into, the risk that they were taking on. So that is not better. The products are still largely controlled by elites who push them at us as opposed to working bottoms up and understanding who are we, what are our issues that we need solving in our lives, and how our financial tools gonna help us address those issues. That is not how financial services works today. Your financial provider, I can be pretty sure.

Doesn’t matter how much money you have, he doesn’t know you that well. And he doesn’t know you how you’re changing over time. He doesn’t deeply understand your relationships, your values, your attitudes about money, your psychology of money and how you were raised as a child and to think about money. What technology does is it perpetuates and maybe simplifies and expands access of existing capabilities that exist in the world. 

So there’s still a lot to be done with respect to changing the way products work. What we’re doing at Knomee is trying to force a paradigm shift to say financial services should be built from the bottom up, understanding its customers deeply enough so that it can provide value in a way that the customer deems valuable, eliminating conflicts of interest. Don’t sell me something that’s not right for me. Don’t sell me something that is just going to make you more money and that for me might be totally, totally opposed to what my vision of the future is. And there’s no way for an individual today to hold their financial provider accountable, be it a digital provider or a human provider, doesn’t matter. The opportunity right now in technology is to start with data, to understand those needs, to use everything we’ve learned about customer engagement, that the other industries have gotten very right, but it’s taken them years.

Financial services still doesn’t have it. And that engagement model, if you look at wellness apps, dating apps, weight loss apps, language learning apps, you know, without saying the names, I bet you can think of 20 that come to your head right now. Those apps have changed the game as it relates to engaging you using the latest, greatest technology. Most of them use psychology. They are all focused on increasing your dopamine. They put you through these compulsion loops of exercises, short, medium, and long -term compulsion loops, so that you keep coming into that application because it is giving you something that is driving some need that you have. That is coming to financial services. And when you think about how it can come in a very healthy way, it is when you use that beautiful capability that technology has introduced to tap into your dopamine, to tap in what’s important to you, but for the purpose of serving your future, for the purpose of giving you value in return as a consumer and respecting the fact that you, better than anyone else, knows what it is that you want to achieve out of life.

Jessica Buchleitner: So if you could talk about how incentive models and personal agency, which I know you’re trying to do a paradigm shift of with Knomee, how that plays into what we just discussed.

Marla Sofer: Yeah, it goes back to, you know, girl math and how a lot of underserved demographics, women of course, but also others, have bought in to the financial services narrative. It serves them when we believe that they are smarter, more sophisticated, trustworthy. In some cases they are, in some cases they’re not. And every single person I’ve met has a story of where they haven’t been. Everyone’s got a story.

We’ve all been sold a bill of goods and we were like, yeah, that didn’t turn out what I wanted, what I thought it was going to be. And, for some people it has introduced incredible life transitions and shifts that they weren’t prepared for. I don’t want to say that all financial services professionals are bad. Absolutely not quite the contrary. There are financial planners, especially human centric financial planners that are credentialed. They’re fiduciaries. They try to take action “fiduciary” just means that they are paid as you make money. So as you make money, they make money. They are not necessarily pushing products in return for commissions But that doesn’t necessarily mean that there aren’t conflicts of interest many many financial professionals, almost all are compensated when they manage your assets. And so what they want to do is get you to concentrate as many of your assets under their control as possible because when they do that they make more money. 

When we think about incentives, I think there is a level of knowledge and familiarity, not of how they make money, but of what your needs are. Understanding where you are in your life, where maybe you’ve been burned, and understanding what model works for you and what you’re trying to achieve. The menu of options today is broader than it’s ever been, ever, in the past. So if you think about where you might want to get some support with your financial decisions it used to be that you would work with a stockbroker that would sell you a product you’d pay him a commission for an investment. And now it’s kind of turned into what they call rep SPM. It just means that they make a portion of your assets. Now the menu has expanded. There are providers that will charge you hourly, like a lawyer, come and get some advice from me and pay hourly. There are providers that say, “I will just help you create a financial plan. I don’t even have to help you execute it. Pay me for the plan. What I’m going to do is ingest everything that you know about your financial identity right now, your assets, where they live, the tax treatment of each of those assets, your goals, your attitudes, your behaviors about money, your spending, everything else. Who you share money with.” All of those components of your financial identity allow you to align the incentive with your provider. 

So before it was a provider trying to sell you products, their incentive is sell you as much product as they possibly can or concentrate as much wallet as they possibly can. But what they’re desperate for today, more than anything else, is knowledge of you. They need to know more about you so that you don’t leave and so that you are delighted and engaged as a client for longer time. So the incentive alignment happens and that personal agency, when you say, “I’ll let you know me, if you give me value in return, I’m gonna help you understand what value means to me.” Instead of comparing my investment portfolio to an arbitrary S&P 500 or Dow Jones or any other benchmark out there in the market.

When I speak with you every three months or every month, hopefully even more frequent because even that cadence is quite arbitrary. But whenever I speak to my, person who’s helping me with my money, I want them to hold themselves to a benchmark of: how are you doing toward achieving my goals? Have you, have you enabled me to take an extra vacation this year? Have you made it easier for me to pay for my children’s college? Was I able to buy the car that I wanted to buy the house that I wanted to buy? Was I able to move to the place that I’m looking to move, those are the benchmarks that are relevant. And so if you can answer the question, “yes,” then it’s worthwhile for you to open up and share your data with those individuals who are helping you on your journey.

Jessica Buchleitner: And I’ve personally had experience with this, talking to various financial advisors over the years, some who were condescending, whom I needed simple explanations of a product or a service. And they treated me like I was an idiot for not knowing, you know, what does this word mean? What is this term? Why does it work that way? Some of, sometimes you just don’t get that from someone because they’re so used to being from their whatever MBA class that they came from, that they’re, they’re not used to treating customers with enough respect or dignity. That leads into Money and shame seem to go hand in hand in many ways. Many of the narratives in our head about money are about shaming us. And I could easily do five episodes on why that is. There’s psychology, there’s society behind this. There’s many reasons why we go down the shame track when we think about money. And it’s always, do I not have enough? Have I not done enough? Am I not where I should be?

But it can drive, One of the main concerns about shame, and you touched on this earlier, is that it can drive people into avoidant behaviors. I have a friend who’s within the age group you mentioned in this blog post, and she, at one point, could not look at a financial statement. And I would say, no, no, no, you know, I worked in financial services. I can help explain this to you. Nope, nope, I don’t want to look at it. I have no interest. I get anxiety and You could see the physical change in her body. You know, she was edgy and nervous, even talking about looking at a financial statement. after Having the journalism and research background that I have, I sat down with her and asked her, “Why are you this way? Did something happen? What’s the backstory?” And she said, “Over the years, I made a lot of bad financial choices, got into a relationship where my credit was ruined, made some bad investments, and now I just completely avoid the topic of money because I’m not good at it, it’s not for me.” So what are some of the common shame narratives that you see existing around personal finance that evoke this avoidance behavior?

Marla Sofer: Yeah, that story, I bet everyone listening has felt that or has knows somebody who has experienced that. The fact that it is so widespread is something that I think we really need to harness. So when you think about what common shame narratives exist, it’s everything that you said. I’m not good at this, I’m bad at money, I’ve made horrible mistakes. I don’t even want to look at it. I want to avoid it. I want to put my head in the ground and never look at it again. It’s worse than that. What we’ve actually found in our research, and there’s actually a lot of public research about this, if you think about all of the elements of wellness, what drives wellness in our lives? It is our health. It’s our relationships. It’s our spiritual health. 

It’s our financial health. It’s our environmental relationships. There is a eight dimensions of wellness and there’s kind of a well -known wellness wheel of all of the different parts of wellness that need to work together. When you are financially unwell and shame is one of those things that keeps us financially unwell, it breaks multiple other spokes on the wellness wheel. Money is known to be the second leading cause of divorce. And actually the first is communication. bet a lot of that communications about money.

So maybe it’s both. It is also a very leading cause of gastrointestinal issues, of sleep issues, of headaches, of physical ailments, of all kinds of stress that we feel in our lives. And the reason is because we have a horrible, horrible relationship with money as a society. We hold money up as this incredible, incredible, beautiful gem of a thing that we all should strive to attain more of without really understanding for what? What is it that we need the money to help us achieve in our lives? And what I’ve, what I, when I come back to kind of this concept of shame, it, it’s really rooted in how society views money and our own insecurity, which is not accidental. Our insecurity comes from an industry that is incentivized to get us to buy, buy, buy, buy, buy. Not only the financial industry, you know, we’re a consumer economy. Everything is about how they are trying to get more of our money, however possible. The financial industry in particular introduced all of this jargon, new language, inaccessible concepts that have encouraged us to feel even smaller, even more shameful, even less to have a ride at the table when we’re talking even about our own money. We earned that money. we should have a say in what it’s going to be doing for what purpose. So I do feel that those common narratives exist. think everyone has, they can play in their head. What is the narrative you’re listening to?

Well, the first step is what if money is not the goal? What if we said money has nothing to do with happiness and money’s not the goal? Your task to live your best life is to figure out what is it a tool for? Money is your tool, not your goal. When you think about money as a tool, you give yourself permission to then define what do I need money for? And you kick out of that narrative of shame and you don’t have to know anything about derivatives or futures or options or all of those scary words. All you need to know about is what brings me joy? What do I want to use money to help me do? And that’s what we help you actually clearly articulate in Knomee so that you can share that information with people who are there to support you on your journey.

Jessica Buchleitner: And shame becomes part of an identity crisis that many people have often. You’ve also mentioned the term financial identity as we’ve been talking, which reminds me that most people define, and I was guilty of this for the longest time before I actually started working in the industry. What my financial identity is, is how much I have invested or what I actually spend money on, my consumer behavior, for example, but it’s so much more multifaceted than that.

But you actually have a different definition on the website, which I thought was more comprehensive. And that is financial identity comprises goals, values, risk, behaviors, and other basic information about you. And we forget that even the most simple data, what gender do you identify as? How tall are you? What is your age group? All of that are sellable points that some advertiser at some point off of a social media platform has tried to sell to us from. So when you think about it in terms of your definition, this puts me as a consumer much more in control than the other ideas that I’ve had in the past. So how can we best utilize this definition and put ourselves in control?

Marla Sofer: Yeah, I love that. Thank you also for kind of bringing up this idea. I do want to also say that one of the first blog posts I wrote is when a lot of people think of financial identity, they think of a credit score. And a lot of people have defined themselves themselves by their credit score. That’s crazy. So let me just go do a quick aside here. A credit score is not created for you. A credit score is created for a bank or a credit provider, a lender of some sort, to have a quick, quick heuristic to judge you based off of your payment history. That’s all it is. And if you think about why you might want to make a choice about what financial product is right for me, how limiting is that concept of a credit score? A credit score only, that’s all it does. What does your payment history look like and your relationship with credit in the past?

And with that, we’re going to give you a score, but that score does absolutely nothing for you. A financial identity, to your point, it helps you clearly answer the question: what is it that you want to be doing with your money? What is your vision of the future? The things that answer the question, is this product right for me? And when you ask yourself, well, it depends, it depends on what? It is those things you referenced, your demographics, your values, your goals, your psychology, your attitudes, your behaviors, your life events. As you go through life events, not all of them are goals, but they’re gonna happen no matter what. And then the last thing that’s in your financial identity is who do you share your money with? Who is it that is part of your cohort of people that are in your unit that you need to share your money or information about your money to get you where you’re going? When you answer all these questions and some of them are hard to answer. One of the things that we do is we don’t just come out and ask you, what are your goals? Because most people answer that question with, I don’t know. I have no idea. And if we start by breaking that down using behavioral psychology, there is tons of research that is not necessarily taught to you, the individual, but it’s taught to financial planners and financial planners know how to get you to break it down.

And that’s what we’re embedding into our application. It should be accessible to everyone. The ways to get to your goals are to think about what brings you joy? Where do you want to spend more time? Where do you maybe want to spend less time? The things that you prefer to outsource and subtract from your life. If you think about what good looks like, and when you think about 75 year old you, maybe you are 75, think about 95 year old you. What is that person doing? What is she enjoying?

What are the things that bring meaning to her life? It doesn’t necessarily have to be pleasure. There was a podcast I recently listened to that said the definition of happiness is not only pleasure, but meaning. And meaning comes not only from pleasurable experiences, it comes from doing the hard things that give you a sense that you are living your life to the max. You are living an authentic and full life with integrity. And so in order to get to that life of meaning, we help you define what does that look like? What does that life of meaning mean for you? And then you can create the goals to get there.

Jessica Buchleitner: That’s powerful. And it reminds me of a book that I read and a future guest, hopefully, on this show. There’s a book called Range, How Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World. And it actually talks about how we’re encouraged by society to be specialized so narrowly in something, but that people find more success by pursuing fulfillment. And so we do have a society where people pursue money as success, but they’re pursuing it under all of these narratives that are driving them away from having a better financial life in many ways. And a lot of this parlays into the evolution of social media tech companies and this data ownership paradigm that we’ve been in that Cambridge Analytica brought to our attention for the first time or raised awareness of that it’s largely controlled by advertisers who target us to get data often without our knowledge in exchange for us to use a service for free.

But Knomee flips the script on this and offers a very different data paradigm. So how does it do that? And why is that so important? Yeah, the most important thing is what does Knomee do? We incentivize you to aggregate your own data. Why would you do that? Why would you aggregate your own data? And the reason is because today you are living reactively to so many people that are telling you what you should be doing and how you should be behaving with your money. The reason you would trust Knomee is because nobody sees that data without your full consent and permission. You are responsible for opening and closing the pipes to the information about you with respect to how is it being used? Is it being used to help me? Is it being used to inspire me, to motivate me to take action, to give me the right solutions at the right times based off of the goals that I have in the future? So what Knomee is doing is the way we approach it is we start with the ‘why’. 

What is money a tool for? What are you aiming for? 

We inspire reflection, self -awareness, values. Where do your values come from? We help you put down the milestone markers, put down the flags and celebrate the flag. When you create a goal, you build more happiness because there’s a goal that you achieve, you reach, you celebrate, and you can move on to the next one. And so when you create that goal, it should align to that definition of contentment, of happiness, pleasure plus meaning. 

To achieve those things, you have to define what that means in your own context, as opposed to always being in the constant search. My academic advisor, Dr. Meg Lurtz, who works at Columbia and Kansas State, she calls it a hedonic treadmill, that we are just always running and running and running and never reaching. So instead of being on that reactive constant search for meaning and happiness, take a moment. We’re gonna help you walk you through all of these activities so that you can plant flags in your future. And then when you get there, you celebrate and you move on to the next one. Data ownership to that point, when you think about what that means, it is knowing what you want that enables you to have the control to focus on those things. If you don’t know what you want, then that is not gonna stop other people from telling you what you want, which in essence means you are not in control.

You are no longer in control when people are telling you what you need and what you want. What Knomee does is allows you to pause, let me define what I want because I want the reins on my future. I want to make sure that every decision I make, especially as it relates to high -risk financial products or any type of risk financial products for that matter, I want to make sure that they are enabling me to express my identity in a way that feels authentic. It feels right for me.

Don’t push me into something high risk if that’s not comfortable. And don’t put my money into something I don’t want to be supporting. The only way that you can get to that future state is by defining: What does that mean again? What are those things you don’t want to support? What is that uncomfortable range so that I know we won’t go there? What is the comfortable range? You’ve got to clarify that. If you don’t clarify that, you’ve got no rubric of accountability for your money. And that won’t stop the sales guys. So yeah, it puts you in a position of control.

Jessica Buchleitner: What is your hope going forward for financial services in general, especially in how they’re driving narratives in people’s minds about money?

Marla Sofer: My hope is that there is a, I hope Knomee plays a role in this, that there is a groundswell and a sea change of people who say, not any longer. I am not going to listen to this narrative that I’m not good with money. I’m not going to chase money without any purpose. I am going to take control and I’m going to hold my money accountable. What I hope in the future that we see is that the menu continues to expand.

Today, I hate to say this, but for most people who are in investments, the menu is smaller than it’s ever been. While we are getting baskets of securities, I’m sorry for getting jargony here, but whereas in order to buy a mutual fund, let’s say, long ago, there was much higher costs and commissions to get there. Now we have low cost ETFs. Everyone can buy a basket of securities, the S &P 500, let’s say. What that took away from us, is now there are models and most people are pushed into any variation of call it five to seven different models. But we as humans have a lot more than five or seven degrees of variation. We have unlimited degrees of variation. We’re each a snowflake. So if you think about investing in the future, this is very much a trend in the world of wealth and asset management to personalize at a much more granular level. The tools exist, tech exists to get there. Now, instead of buying a whole share of something, you can buy a tiny sliver of a share. So you can actually have this much better allocated portfolio that is more aligned with who you are and what you want. What doesn’t exist is the information about you. I’ve got the tool, I don’t have the data to plug in. And so what I hope the financial industry does in the future is really embrace this paradigm shift that when individuals take control of their own data set, their own financial identities, then individuals get to hold their money accountable and the level of service that they get from the industry goes way up. It’s way more personalized. You don’t find people who are paying five, $10,000 for one meeting just to kind of compare them to a benchmark and say, yeah, you’re doing okay. You’re on track for retirement. Wait, what does retirement mean again? Yeah, you never asked. 

So Knomee is going to change the paradigm and say, no, I know exactly what this means to me. I’m holding you accountable. Financial services will get more pinpointed and higher value for every individual that needs it. 

Jessica Buchleitner: In my second to last question, as we’re wrapping up this episode, is there anything that I should have asked you that I didn’t ask you at this point?

Marla Sofer: I don’t know. Those are a lot of really good questions. And when I think about narrative, I think you hit on the number one most important issue here is that we all live with a narrative about money and we inherit it from our parents. We inherit it from our society and then we become adults and we inherit it from the financial industry that, you know, kind of pounds those nails in even harder into our own narrative. And so it takes a little bit. of a different approach, a more mindful approach to say, you know, that narrative isn’t serving me. And it’s true for any wellness journey, for any mental health journey that you’ve been on, to question what are the narratives that you’ve been consuming and ask whether or not it has been serving you. And as it relates to money, more likely than not, it’s not serving you. So in order to change the narrative and in order to take control of how you’re going to use money in the future, build a much more productive, effective relationship, increase your self -efficacy around money, then you need to start with understanding what money does for you. And so I think you asked me a lot of good questions. I don’t think there’s anything that we didn’t touch on, but I really like the pairing of this particular problem that I’m solving with data and the conversation around a narrative and this narrative that is keeping us down. It’s keeping us financially ill.

Jessica Buchleitner: Exactly. I found with narratives, you can have an excellent product for someone, but if they have this, I call them blocker narratives. If they have this blocker narrative about why they shouldn’t have that product, they’ll never go for it. Or they think they’ll have the shame feeling of, I’m not good enough, or I, I’m not smart enough to have that product. So it’s important to clear the cobwebs of narratives first before anything else, which is why we are making this show. So there’s a question that I ask every guest and it’s an important one. It’s what narrative have you challenged recently and how did it shift your thinking?

Marla Sofer: I feel like the last two years I have been like, if you kind of can think of a visual, I feel like I’ve been kind of in full armor with a sword, like just like hacking away at, you know, the thorn bushes of narratives that have stopped me from living my life. If you can imagine like a tiny little woman like with full armor hacking away.

So the narrative that I can’t be a founder, I can’t fundraise, I can’t attract a high quality team, I can’t go through all the marketing, I can’t put my 47 year old face on videos and go on social media, like all of these, I can’t, I can’t, I can’t. Those are the ones that I am just taking a sledgehammer to, or a sword, one by one, and trying to address, wait a second, what if I try? What if I take one step today that allows me to challenge that one narrative? One of the narratives that we get a lot, and I’m grateful for feedback from any listeners or anyone else that might be listening to the podcast and sees this, is this narrative that this concept that Knomee is built around is just too abstract for people to understand. People aren’t gonna get it. It’s too out there.

I think that the best, most innovative tech innovations of our time started like that. They started as an abstract concept that everyone said, people aren’t going to get it. They’re not going to want it. They’re not going to want Uber. They’re definitely not going to want Facebook. They’re not going to want Google. Why would they want that? Now look. And so these ideas, they’re big paradigm shifting ideas. And so that is like the, I would say the meta narrative that I’m challenging is, no, I think people will get it. I think they’ll understand.

What we’re trying to do. And I think they’ll see a tremendous amount of value in the agency that they’re going to get in living better lives.

Jessica Buchleitner: Marla, I can’t thank you enough for coming on this show and talking about financial narratives. These are hugely important and we will have actually more episodes around them. This one was centered around data. We’ll have a more psychological perspective on them, but the financial narratives are so much. And if we want to empower people financially and give them the tools, we also have to shift their way of thinking as well. Personal agency, as you mentioned earlier. So thank you so much for coming on the show.

Marla Sofer: Thank you, Jessica.