Good morning, Broadsheet readers! Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo talks Olympics, Adidas appoints former WNBA player Candace Parker as president of its women's basketball business, and a new fintech platform wants to make it easier for couples to combine finances—and put more women in the driver's seat. Have a thoughtful Thursday!
- Financial planning. When Emily Luk and Channing Allen started talking about getting engaged, they took early steps toward combining their finances. They asked each other questions on a list of topics to discuss with your partner before getting married. The couple—who met while working at the fintech startup Even, later acquired by Walmart—went from sending Venmo requests to split the costs of big trips to figuring out how they would buy a house or raise kids.
Throughout the process, they realized that combining finances for people in their demographic—millennials marrying in their 30s—wasn't simple. Everyone they knew was getting married after at least a decade in the workforce and was accustomed to managing their money independently. And their friends relied on a laundry list of apps, from budgeting apps to investment roboadvisors to their regular bank. Those apps were designed for one user; while many platforms allow for a secondary user who can view accounts, most do not allow two users to deposit and withdraw funds. "Existing institutions made this very patriarchal assumption that only one person in the relationship is ever really involved in managing the money," Luk says.
The experience planted the seeds for Plenty, Luk and Allen's platform to help couples manage their money. Luk, a Stripe alumna, is now the CEO of the business, launched in 2022; Allen is its chief technology officer. The platform is debuting today, with $5 million in seed funding, Fortune is the first to report. Its investors include Inovia Capital, Garage Capital, Otherwise Fund, and Interplay. Meena Harris' Phenomenal Ventures and Kevin Durant's 35 Ventures were among its pre-seed investors.
The founders designed their platform for couples to manage their finances with a "yours, mine, and ours" strategy. Both members of a couple can have accounts that belong only to them alongside joint accounts on the shared platform, and even private accounts the other person can't see—something Luk says people cautiously combining finances for the first time often want. They have protocols in place for breakups; users retain what was only theirs on the platform and can later add a new partner to their account.
The eight-person startup sees itself combining the tools of traditional financial planners, budgeting apps, and roboadvisors. Plenty costs $100 per person per year, plus annual investing fees, and offers financial products including cash management, investing, budgeting, and forecasting. The goal is to add other products, like a couple's first joint credit card.
Luk has spent time thinking about women's approach to money in relationships. Seventy-four percent of widows and divorcées surveyed by UBS discovered "negative financial surprises" after losing their spouse or ending their relationship, sometimes by combing through emails and accounts to figure out what they had; 76% said they wished they'd been more involved in long-term financial decisions. She hopes that making it easier for couples to see everything in one place puts fewer women in that position. "Our goal is to become the primary place where a couple manages their money," she says.
Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com
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