Why We Think AI Is About to Change Who Gets Good Financial Guidance
We started Lanyard because something didn't add up to us. People have more financial apps than ever, and financial stress still hasn't gone down. If anything, with costs rising, it feels worse.
Here's why we think that is. Almost every tool out there answers the same question: where did your money go. Almost none of them answer the two questions that actually matter: what should you do next, and are you on track. Visibility was never the missing piece. Guidance was, and good guidance has always been expensive, often reserved for people who can afford an advisor charging by the hour or taking a cut of their assets. Those advisors are often conflicted or biased toward pre-defined products.
That's the gap we built Lanyard to close, which is why a study out of MIT Sloan and Stanford this summer mattered a lot to us.
MIT Sloan & Stanford: AI financial advice is “surprisingly good,” especially if you ask the right questions
Researchers simulated a full working life, age 22 to 90, and tested what happens when people follow AI-generated financial advice throughout it.
Read the MIT Sloan studyThe result: on average, following the AI's guidance moved people meaningfully closer to sound long-term financial decisions than what they'd actually do on their own: better diversification, more appropriate risk levels for their age, and stronger savings habits. One of the researchers summed it up well:
“It's not perfect, but it's already better than how most people currently make these decisions, whether that's asking friends or searching the internet.” On the MIT Sloan & Stanford findings
The study wasn't uncritical, and neither are we. Quality depended heavily on how detailed the question was, and outcomes skewed weaker for women and less financially experienced users. That tells us AI won't close the guidance gap by accident. It has to be built deliberately to close it. That's part of why we don't just hand someone a blank box to type into.
We're confident in the direction here. Traditional financial advice has three problems that have never really gone away:
Three problems AI takes on at once
It's meant paying an advisor by the hour, or handing over a cut of everything you've saved.
The advice is often shaped by what the advisor gets paid to sell, not by what's right for you.
For most people, sitting down with a human advisor was never realistically on the table.
AI attacks all three at once, and it's getting better fast.
The models available today reason through nuance, hold far more context, and give noticeably sharper answers than what we had access to even a year ago, and every signal points to that curve accelerating, not leveling off. A separate survey found more Americans have already turned to AI for financial guidance than have ever worked with a human advisor, a shift that only makes sense given how quickly the tools underneath it are improving.
That's what makes this moment feel different to us. Not a single clever app, but the early edge of a real shift in who gets access to good financial guidance in the first place. We think personal finance has been overdue for this kind of disruption for a long time, and we think we're just getting started.
We couldn't be more excited to be building at the leading edge of it with you.
This is the shift we're building for.
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Want the side‑by‑side? See how Lanyard compares to budgeting apps, robo‑advisors and financial advisors.
Questions or thoughts? Reach us at hello@lanyardmoney.com