TrustPlus
Growth Capital Prospectus
2023–2025
Growth Capital Prospectus
2023–2025
Neighborhood Trust’s North Star is worker freedom from exploitative debt. In pursuit of this vision, we seek an investment of $7 million to grow the impact and scale of our social enterprise, TrustPlus, over the next three years. Our work over this time will put an estimated $130 million of hard-earned wages back into the pockets of 20,000 low-income workers through TrustPlus’ proprietary financial coaching+product model. We will multiply our impact over the long run as an aggregator of worker intelligence and voice to disrupt the systems and markets that currently keep them trapped in debt cycles.
TrustPlus, our worker financial health solution, provides trusted, human-touch financial coaching linked to safe and affordable financial products. We sell TrustPlus as a formal worker benefit to employers, benefits providers, financial institutions, and fintechs across the country, enabling them to embed trusted guidance within their benefit and product offerings. Our relationship with these business customers allows us to not only serve their employees and clients, but also deliver valuable insights and expertise so they can improve their products, services and practices to better meet worker financial needs at scale. To date, TrustPlus has served over 12,000 workers with financial coaching through 200+ customers across 45 states.
Our work is grounded in the reality that 60% of workers in the U.S. live paycheck to paycheck due to low-quality, low-wage jobs and, as a result, depend on expensive debt to make ends meet. Today, U.S. households carry $4.51 trillion in non-mortgage household debt and 72% of adults feel stressed about money. Compounding this challenge is the lack of solutions within financial services that enable workers to escape debt or achieve stability. And achieving security is only becoming harder with the expiration of pandemic-related relief benefits, uncertainty around student debt forgiveness, persistent inflation, and a looming recession. Read more about our perspective on the root causes of worker debt in our white paper, “Workers’ Reliance on Debt and the Role of the Nature of Work.”
Given the scale of the debt crisis and it being at the root of financial insecurity, we believe that the best evidence that workers are financially healthy is the absence of expensive or predatory debt in all its forms. Therefore, our North Star is financial security for all workers as measured by freedom from a reliance on exploitive debt to get by.
TrustPlus creates worker financial security by not only meeting workers’ immediate needs with human-touch financial coaching, but also lifting up their voices to drive systems change. We generate trusted, powerful insights distilled from thousands of coaching dialogues and our Financial Coaches’ tacit knowledge accrued over years of service, which can be used to develop innovative, worker-focused solutions. As direct service providers and experts on the financial lives of low-wage workers, we have always been uniquely positioned to be insightful innovators. Now is the moment for an investment in our growth, so we can finally capitalize on our potential to meet the need for solutions like ours.
With the growth capital investment we need to execute on our plans through 2025, we will achieve the following in pursuit of freedom from debt for all workers:
- Serve 20,000 workers with TrustPlus financial coaching (by ramping up to 12,000 served in 2025)
- Grow our portfolio to 160 business customers and improve their benefits, products and practices such that our impact is felt by the 1 million workers they reach
- Increase operational sustainability by increasing earned revenue by 300% and reducing cost per client by 180%, enabling us to maximize philanthropic dollars for impact
- Build a data engine and processes that tap our growing user-base of over 25,000 individuals to generate disaggregated data and insights on low-wage workers’ financial realities
- Bring a new solution to market that competes with and undermines the predatory debt market, informed by our data and insights
These next three years will be catalytic for our growth as a data aggregator and amplifier of workers’ lived experiences so we can move from creating financial security at a scale of thousands of workers to hundreds of thousands of workers. We will not stop until all workers across the labor and financial services markets are finally financially secure and free from their reliance on expensive debt to get by.
Amidst inflation, stagnated wages, and overwhelming debt, workers are increasingly in need of better financial solutions and demanding to be heard. Every day we hear from the workers we serve a desire to be understood as people with complex lives inside and outside of work and with nuanced financial needs that are not currently being met by the market. A trusted human touch is not only necessary for understanding and empathizing with workers, but also for effectively communicating those complexities back to institutions (namely employers, benefits providers, and financial services).
We see three market demands emerging as a result of this dynamic that are both central to creating worker financial health, with worker voice (defined as workers’ freedom and ability to represent their own interests on the job or have those interests fairly represented by a larger collective) as the connecting through-line:
- Workers want a human touch embedded in their workplace benefits and financial products & services. Workers are demanding a real human connection with someone who is equipped with the expertise to help them tackle debt and achieve financial security, seamlessly embedded within products to create easy access. Research from Forrester found that 62% of banking consumers want a human touch paired with digital banking products, while only 34% want digital banking alone.
- Workers want to be heard, and institutions are seeing the value in listening. In today’s tight labor market and with the increasing prevalence of gig and freelance work where traditional unions aren’t an option, there is a growing opportunity for alternative means for workers to amplify their voices and garner collective power. Meanwhile, giving workers a platform to voice their needs and committing to their growth and well-being offers value to both businesses and individuals. Such practices contribute to companies’ health and development via reduced turnover, increased ROI from training and career advancement, greater process efficiency, and more creative contributions from workers.
- Institutions want actionable insights that enable them to better serve low-wage workers. Traditional workplace benefits and financial products are no longer meeting the needs of low-wage workers because they were designed at a time when wages matched the cost of living. Today, most workers can’t afford to contribute to a 401k or a health savings account, nor can they afford to keep a minimum balance in their checking account or take out a personal loan for large purchases or asset-building. The employers, benefits providers and financial institutions that offer these financial products are now realizing that most of their workers fit this profile, and that business will suffer if they don’t adapt to better meet these workers’ needs. But they are struggling to understand the nature of the problem: workers need benefits and financial products that support short-term cash flow and emergency savings buffers, as a prerequisite for financial security and asset-building. As a result, there is demand for third parties that can support businesses in becoming better attuned to their workers’ needs and recommend competitive, effective practices and products that address them.
Bottom-Line Benefits of Improved Worker Financial Health Across Business Stakeholders
| Employers today are desperate to improve employee retention and differentiate their job postings with better benefits. 97% of employers feel responsible for their employees’ financial wellness, up from 41% in 2013. Yet, only 33% of companies currently offer a financial wellness benefit. Among them, 68% reported that they paid an advisor to help them select the right one. |
| Benefits Providers recognize that as employers seek out better benefits to adequately meet their workers’ financial needs, it’s up to insurers to provide those benefits. Therefore, benefits providers are looking to enhance their benefits to be more equitable. But without direct, trusted access to workers, insurers need outside help to dig deeper into their needs. |
| Financial Institutions are finally seeing the value in offering inclusive and affordable products to low-income populations, for example by eliminating overdraft fees. Increasing access to affordable financial services is “good for customers’ financial health, their communities, and the banking system.” But now that these institutions recognize there’s a market for inclusive products, they need help with implementation. |
| Fintechs are increasingly looking to seamlessly embed a human-touch into their tech products, not only to increase product uptake and effective usage, but also to tap into users’ experiences and feedback so they can enhance user experience, satisfaction, loyalty, and retention. |
TrustPlus lives at the intersection of these market needs by delivering human-touch financial coaching to workers through the workplace and financial services; and by leveraging our trusted connections with workers to amplify their voices through feedback loops between our business customers and their workers. Given this immense market opportunity for us to grow our impact with both workers and institutions, an investment in this growth will open the door for us to be competitive and disruptive.
Today, Neighborhood Trust is pursuing our vision for worker freedom from debt through TrustPlus, our social enterprise and financial health solution, which we sell to a diverse portfolio of business customers across the country as a means of improving the financial health of the low-wage workers they reach via financial coaching and actionable worker intelligence.
Our Financial Coaches spend every day connecting with workers about their financial challenges, understanding the systemic barriers that created or exacerbated those challenges, and identifying solutions and action plans. We have a long history of not only accessing the on-the-ground realities that no one else hears, but also being able to aggregate individual stories into powerful trends and insights. As a result, compassion, empathy, and expertise on workers’ financial lives—which points us to debt as the canary in the coal mine of financial insecurity—underpin every aspect of our solution design and innovation agenda.
TrustPlus’ financial coaching model pairs trusted human guidance with access to relevant and affordable benefits, products and services. Our expert Financial Coaches provide workers with personalized guidance via phone and video, which is complemented by action-oriented digital tools and connections to safe and effective financial products within our proprietary app. Our meaningful impact on workers’ financial security is demonstrated by the $30 million in debt we’ve helped remove from their balance sheets since 2020. Overall, roughly 50% of clients reduce their debt by a median of $3,800; 60% improve their credit; 65% increase their savings; and 83% reduce their stress.
As a social enterprise, we sell TrustPlus via a B2B2C model, generating earned revenue and direct access to thousands of low-wage workers across a range of sectors. We reach workers at opportune moments by partnering with our customers to embed TrustPlus into their benefits, products and services, so we can leverage technology to automatically prompt workers to access financial coaching where and when they’re already thinking about their money or other benefits. For example, a financial institution customer might implement automatically triggered emails/texts with a reminder about TrustPlus whenever a consumer overdrafts, takes out a new loan, is denied a loan, reaches a low balance, or misses a payment.
As we help individual workers strengthen their financial health with financial coaching, we also improve worker financial health at scale by transforming our trusted coach-client relationships into insights that enable businesses to better understand, and respond to, the unique challenges facing the workers they serve. By enabling businesses to better serve low-income workers, we also increase employee retention and productivity, product uptake, and loyalty—supporting their bottom line in the process. See an example of how our value proposition flows through our client and customer journeys here.
Over the next three years we will: (i) grow our business customer portfolio to serve more workers, (ii) improve our client UX and operational efficiency, (iii) and build a data and insights engine so we can more systematically aggregate workers’ voices / data and translate them into advocacy, action and new solutions. This work ahead is detailed below.
Today we’re ready to respond to the demand for our worker solutions and to disrupt the workplace and financial services markets that currently force workers to rely on debt to get by. Our leadership, the quality of our core operation, and newly strengthened product integration and data analytics capabilities position us to achieve a step function in our growth; as well as hone our impact with individual workers and our workplace and financial services customers. An investment of $7 million will enable us to scale our customer portfolio and user base, and launch the next phase of our Worker Insights Initiative that transforms our insights on workers’ financial lives into action.
1) Grow our Portfolio of Business Customers – Over the next three years, we will assertively ramp up our marketing and sales for our 3 target customer segments: small- and medium-size businesses, worker-focused fintechs, and financial institutions. We will transform how we go to market and acquire customers by creating an industry standard sales and conversion funnel that relies on the two pillars of content and promotion to drive down our acquisition cost while raising our visibility. This approach has the added benefit of enabling us to reach currently untapped market segments, while also steadily attracting customers both in and outside our current sphere of influence. We will complement this online marketing campaign with a channel partner strategy, enabling us to reach customers through partnerships with worker networks, advocacy organizations and benefits providers such as Ownership Works and National Bankers Association. By implementing these strategies over the next three years our portfolio will grow to 160 customers who employ or reach over 1 million workers.
We are also building an employer customer portal that will automate routine interactions with employer customers from the first pre-sale moment through contracting, onboarding, data collection, and impact reporting. This portal will allow us to deploy our human capital where it is most needed in the sales process and thus decrease our cost per sale. It will use best-in-class security and login features such as single-sign-on and multi-factor authentication to protect customers and their data. Collecting employee census and benefit data from employer customers will become easy, ensuring we can provide best-in class service to our customers and their employees. The benefit data collected will not only enhance Coaches’ ability to advise workers about how to use employer benefits to become financially secure, but will also feed into our Worker Insights Initiative to drive institutional-level impact, detailed below.
2) Increase our Individual-Level Impact at Scale – To sustainably scale our impact, we will enhance our TrustPlus coaching platform so a growing number of users can more seamlessly access our financial solutions. We will build a user-focused, dynamic database of vetted financial products within the TrustPlus app’s client interface, so we can curate recommendations based on the needs of the user and other users with similar financial profiles. Uptake and ongoing usage of recommended products will be tracked and linked to user progress in a data driven, key performance indicator manner.
We will also increase the efficiency of our coaching operation so it can become more financially self-sustaining and serve a significantly higher volume of clients, while maintaining a positive impact on clients’ personal finances. We recently completed a Scale Consultancy project with Plan Ventures to set Market KPIs for scale, sustainability and impact, and are now equipped to begin the implementation phase. We will be investing in our operational efficiencies and UX improvements with a focus on 5 KPIs to emerge from the consultancy project (report available upon request). With enhancements such as a text expander tool within Coaches’ emailing and SMS, piloting small-group coaching, and automating client satisfaction surveys, we aim to get from a cost per client served of $550 today, to $300 by the end of 2025.
3) Invest in Worker Insights Initiative to Solve for Debt – We will invest in our role as an aggregator and advocate of worker voices so TrustPlus can serve as a conduit to influence the financial and employment systems to be more equitable. We envision a symbiotic relationship with workers whereby TrustPlus delivers value to them by offering human-touch, tech-enabled financial solutions, while workers share their data and stories with us so we can ensure their voices are heard and play a role in shaping solutions.
To start, we will build on our data infrastructure with a new data warehouse, new data collection methods, and analytical and data visualization softwares. We will increase our technical capacity to analyze data we already collect such as recorded coaching sessions through audio transcription software, pilot new client survey and interview methods, and implement methods to source Financial Coaches’ tacit knowledge that take the onus off them to identify patterns. Under the leadership of our Vice President of Innovation, we are currently staffing up a team who will collectively be accountable for managing this data and insights engine, establishing an innovation agenda, continually improving our internal practices, and developing new, business-viable and scalable solutions that tackle workers’ indebtedness.
An investment of $7 million in our growth will put an estimated $130 million of hard-earned wages back into the pockets of low-income workers by the end of 2025 and position us to multiply our impact via systemic change. Over the next three years, we will become a force for change for everyday workers, by growing our business customer portfolio, building an at-scale platform of workers, amplifying worker voice with our data and insights engine, and further chartering our path towards our North Star of freedom from debt for all workers.
Our $7 million campaign reflects our projected funding needs to support TrustPlus’ 3-year financial and operational growth model, detailed here. We calculated this number by subtracting our projected revenue of $12.5 million (including already pledged philanthropic support and longtime annual donors, as well as earned revenue) from our total 3-year TrustPlus budget of $19 million. We plan to grow from a 2023 budget of $5.4 million to $6.1 million in 2024 and $7.4 million in 2025. Our long-term financial projections are grounded in our sophisticated multi-year financial plan, which incorporates assumptions about our anticipated fundraising success, customer and user growth, and increased operational efficiencies.
This campaign is focused on ensuring we secure the $7 million in growth capital critical to achieving our competitive, at-scale and sustainable operation, and delivering on our promise of cultivating new systemic change solutions. Your support will put us on track to serve 20,000 TrustPlus clients over the next three years (a 3x increase), reduce the cost per worker served by 180% from $550 to $300, build a portfolio of 160 customers across the country, earn $3.6 million in customer revenue, and increase our sustainability ratio to 60% of operating costs covered by earned revenue. Philanthropy will remain a part of our financial plan, but as we increase our operational efficiency and earned revenue power, we can direct every philanthropic dollar to further growth and innovation.
Our historical financials are available on our website here.
| Goal | Activities | Cost |
| Scale our Customer Portfolio –$2.7 Million | Create a Digital Marketing and Sales Conversion Funnel
|
$1,137,491 |
Expand Sales and Customer Experience Team
|
$525,834 | |
Build Customer Portal
|
$1,032,324 | |
| Achieve Impact at Scale –$2.3 Million | Enhance TrustPlus User Platform
|
$1,549,144 |
Increase Operational Efficiency
*Per Plan Ventures’ Scaling Consultancy. |
$737,701 | |
| Invest in Worker Insights Initiative and New Solutions –$1.9 Million | Build an Automated, Tech-Enabled Data and Insights Engine
|
$1,505,893 |
Build Innovation Team Capacity and Develop New Solutions
|
$409,359 | |
| Total Growth Expenditures | $6,897,758 |
TrustPlus, our worker financial health solution, provides trusted, human-touch financial coaching linked to safe and affordable financial products. We sell TrustPlus as a formal worker benefit to employers, benefits providers, financial institutions, and fintechs across the country, enabling them to embed trusted guidance within their benefit and product offerings. Our relationship with these business customers allows us to not only serve their employees and clients, but also deliver valuable insights and expertise so they can improve their products, services and practices to better meet worker financial needs at scale. To date, TrustPlus has served over 12,000 workers with financial coaching through 200+ customers across 45 states.
Our work is grounded in the reality that 60% of workers in the U.S. live paycheck to paycheck due to low-quality, low-wage jobs and, as a result, depend on expensive debt to make ends meet. Today, U.S. households carry $4.51 trillion in non-mortgage household debt and 72% of adults feel stressed about money. Compounding this challenge is the lack of solutions within financial services that enable workers to escape debt or achieve stability. And achieving security is only becoming harder with the expiration of pandemic-related relief benefits, uncertainty around student debt forgiveness, persistent inflation, and a looming recession. Read more about our perspective on the root causes of worker debt in our white paper, “Workers’ Reliance on Debt and the Role of the Nature of Work.”
Given the scale of the debt crisis and it being at the root of financial insecurity, we believe that the best evidence that workers are financially healthy is the absence of expensive or predatory debt in all its forms. Therefore, our North Star is financial security for all workers as measured by freedom from a reliance on exploitive debt to get by.
TrustPlus creates worker financial security by not only meeting workers’ immediate needs with human-touch financial coaching, but also lifting up their voices to drive systems change. We generate trusted, powerful insights distilled from thousands of coaching dialogues and our Financial Coaches’ tacit knowledge accrued over years of service, which can be used to develop innovative, worker-focused solutions. As direct service providers and experts on the financial lives of low-wage workers, we have always been uniquely positioned to be insightful innovators. Now is the moment for an investment in our growth, so we can finally capitalize on our potential to meet the need for solutions like ours.
With the growth capital investment we need to execute on our plans through 2025, we will achieve the following in pursuit of freedom from debt for all workers:
- Serve 20,000 workers with TrustPlus financial coaching (by ramping up to 12,000 served in 2025)
- Grow our portfolio to 160 business customers and improve their benefits, products and practices such that our impact is felt by the 1 million workers they reach
- Increase operational sustainability by increasing earned revenue by 300% and reducing cost per client by 180%, enabling us to maximize philanthropic dollars for impact
- Build a data engine and processes that tap our growing user-base of over 25,000 individuals to generate disaggregated data and insights on low-wage workers’ financial realities
- Bring a new solution to market that competes with and undermines the predatory debt market, informed by our data and insights
These next three years will be catalytic for our growth as a data aggregator and amplifier of workers’ lived experiences so we can move from creating financial security at a scale of thousands of workers to hundreds of thousands of workers. We will not stop until all workers across the labor and financial services markets are finally financially secure and free from their reliance on expensive debt to get by.
Amidst inflation, stagnated wages, and overwhelming debt, workers are increasingly in need of better financial solutions and demanding to be heard. Every day we hear from the workers we serve a desire to be understood as people with complex lives inside and outside of work and with nuanced financial needs that are not currently being met by the market. A trusted human touch is not only necessary for understanding and empathizing with workers, but also for effectively communicating those complexities back to institutions (namely employers, benefits providers, and financial services).
We see three market demands emerging as a result of this dynamic that are both central to creating worker financial health, with worker voice (defined as workers’ freedom and ability to represent their own interests on the job or have those interests fairly represented by a larger collective) as the connecting through-line:
- Workers want a human touch embedded in their workplace benefits and financial products & services. Workers are demanding a real human connection with someone who is equipped with the expertise to help them tackle debt and achieve financial security, seamlessly embedded within products to create easy access. Research from Forrester found that 62% of banking consumers want a human touch paired with digital banking products, while only 34% want digital banking alone.
- Workers want to be heard, and institutions are seeing the value in listening. In today’s tight labor market and with the increasing prevalence of gig and freelance work where traditional unions aren’t an option, there is a growing opportunity for alternative means for workers to amplify their voices and garner collective power. Meanwhile, giving workers a platform to voice their needs and committing to their growth and well-being offers value to both businesses and individuals. Such practices contribute to companies’ health and development via reduced turnover, increased ROI from training and career advancement, greater process efficiency, and more creative contributions from workers.
- Institutions want actionable insights that enable them to better serve low-wage workers. Traditional workplace benefits and financial products are no longer meeting the needs of low-wage workers because they were designed at a time when wages matched the cost of living. Today, most workers can’t afford to contribute to a 401k or a health savings account, nor can they afford to keep a minimum balance in their checking account or take out a personal loan for large purchases or asset-building. The employers, benefits providers and financial institutions that offer these financial products are now realizing that most of their workers fit this profile, and that business will suffer if they don’t adapt to better meet these workers’ needs. But they are struggling to understand the nature of the problem: workers need benefits and financial products that support short-term cash flow and emergency savings buffers, as a prerequisite for financial security and asset-building. As a result, there is demand for third parties that can support businesses in becoming better attuned to their workers’ needs and recommend competitive, effective practices and products that address them.
Bottom-Line Benefits of Improved Worker Financial Health Across Business Stakeholders
| Employers today are desperate to improve employee retention and differentiate their job postings with better benefits. 97% of employers feel responsible for their employees’ financial wellness, up from 41% in 2013. Yet, only 33% of companies currently offer a financial wellness benefit. Among them, 68% reported that they paid an advisor to help them select the right one. |
| Benefits Providers recognize that as employers seek out better benefits to adequately meet their workers’ financial needs, it’s up to insurers to provide those benefits. Therefore, benefits providers are looking to enhance their benefits to be more equitable. But without direct, trusted access to workers, insurers need outside help to dig deeper into their needs. |
| Financial Institutions are finally seeing the value in offering inclusive and affordable products to low-income populations, for example by eliminating overdraft fees. Increasing access to affordable financial services is “good for customers’ financial health, their communities, and the banking system.” But now that these institutions recognize there’s a market for inclusive products, they need help with implementation. |
| Fintechs are increasingly looking to seamlessly embed a human-touch into their tech products, not only to increase product uptake and effective usage, but also to tap into users’ experiences and feedback so they can enhance user experience, satisfaction, loyalty, and retention. |
TrustPlus lives at the intersection of these market needs by delivering human-touch financial coaching to workers through the workplace and financial services; and by leveraging our trusted connections with workers to amplify their voices through feedback loops between our business customers and their workers. Given this immense market opportunity for us to grow our impact with both workers and institutions, an investment in this growth will open the door for us to be competitive and disruptive.
Today, Neighborhood Trust is pursuing our vision for worker freedom from debt through TrustPlus, our social enterprise and financial health solution, which we sell to a diverse portfolio of business customers across the country as a means of improving the financial health of the low-wage workers they reach via financial coaching and actionable worker intelligence.
Our Financial Coaches spend every day connecting with workers about their financial challenges, understanding the systemic barriers that created or exacerbated those challenges, and identifying solutions and action plans. We have a long history of not only accessing the on-the-ground realities that no one else hears, but also being able to aggregate individual stories into powerful trends and insights. As a result, compassion, empathy, and expertise on workers’ financial lives—which points us to debt as the canary in the coal mine of financial insecurity—underpin every aspect of our solution design and innovation agenda.
TrustPlus’ financial coaching model pairs trusted human guidance with access to relevant and affordable benefits, products and services. Our expert Financial Coaches provide workers with personalized guidance via phone and video, which is complemented by action-oriented digital tools and connections to safe and effective financial products within our proprietary app. Our meaningful impact on workers’ financial security is demonstrated by the $30 million in debt we’ve helped remove from their balance sheets since 2020. Overall, roughly 50% of clients reduce their debt by a median of $3,800; 60% improve their credit; 65% increase their savings; and 83% reduce their stress.
As a social enterprise, we sell TrustPlus via a B2B2C model, generating earned revenue and direct access to thousands of low-wage workers across a range of sectors. We reach workers at opportune moments by partnering with our customers to embed TrustPlus into their benefits, products and services, so we can leverage technology to automatically prompt workers to access financial coaching where and when they’re already thinking about their money or other benefits. For example, a financial institution customer might implement automatically triggered emails/texts with a reminder about TrustPlus whenever a consumer overdrafts, takes out a new loan, is denied a loan, reaches a low balance, or misses a payment.
As we help individual workers strengthen their financial health with financial coaching, we also improve worker financial health at scale by transforming our trusted coach-client relationships into insights that enable businesses to better understand, and respond to, the unique challenges facing the workers they serve. By enabling businesses to better serve low-income workers, we also increase employee retention and productivity, product uptake, and loyalty—supporting their bottom line in the process. See an example of how our value proposition flows through our client and customer journeys here.
Over the next three years we will: (i) grow our business customer portfolio to serve more workers, (ii) improve our client UX and operational efficiency, (iii) and build a data and insights engine so we can more systematically aggregate workers’ voices / data and translate them into advocacy, action and new solutions. This work ahead is detailed below.
Today we’re ready to respond to the demand for our worker solutions and to disrupt the workplace and financial services markets that currently force workers to rely on debt to get by. Our leadership, the quality of our core operation, and newly strengthened product integration and data analytics capabilities position us to achieve a step function in our growth; as well as hone our impact with individual workers and our workplace and financial services customers. An investment of $7 million will enable us to scale our customer portfolio and user base, and launch the next phase of our Worker Insights Initiative that transforms our insights on workers’ financial lives into action.
1) Grow our Portfolio of Business Customers – Over the next three years, we will assertively ramp up our marketing and sales for our 3 target customer segments: small- and medium-size businesses, worker-focused fintechs, and financial institutions. We will transform how we go to market and acquire customers by creating an industry standard sales and conversion funnel that relies on the two pillars of content and promotion to drive down our acquisition cost while raising our visibility. This approach has the added benefit of enabling us to reach currently untapped market segments, while also steadily attracting customers both in and outside our current sphere of influence. We will complement this online marketing campaign with a channel partner strategy, enabling us to reach customers through partnerships with worker networks, advocacy organizations and benefits providers such as Ownership Works and National Bankers Association. By implementing these strategies over the next three years our portfolio will grow to 160 customers who employ or reach over 1 million workers.
We are also building an employer customer portal that will automate routine interactions with employer customers from the first pre-sale moment through contracting, onboarding, data collection, and impact reporting. This portal will allow us to deploy our human capital where it is most needed in the sales process and thus decrease our cost per sale. It will use best-in-class security and login features such as single-sign-on and multi-factor authentication to protect customers and their data. Collecting employee census and benefit data from employer customers will become easy, ensuring we can provide best-in class service to our customers and their employees. The benefit data collected will not only enhance Coaches’ ability to advise workers about how to use employer benefits to become financially secure, but will also feed into our Worker Insights Initiative to drive institutional-level impact, detailed below.
2) Increase our Individual-Level Impact at Scale – To sustainably scale our impact, we will enhance our TrustPlus coaching platform so a growing number of users can more seamlessly access our financial solutions. We will build a user-focused, dynamic database of vetted financial products within the TrustPlus app’s client interface, so we can curate recommendations based on the needs of the user and other users with similar financial profiles. Uptake and ongoing usage of recommended products will be tracked and linked to user progress in a data driven, key performance indicator manner.
We will also increase the efficiency of our coaching operation so it can become more financially self-sustaining and serve a significantly higher volume of clients, while maintaining a positive impact on clients’ personal finances. We recently completed a Scale Consultancy project with Plan Ventures to set Market KPIs for scale, sustainability and impact, and are now equipped to begin the implementation phase. We will be investing in our operational efficiencies and UX improvements with a focus on 5 KPIs to emerge from the consultancy project (report available upon request). With enhancements such as a text expander tool within Coaches’ emailing and SMS, piloting small-group coaching, and automating client satisfaction surveys, we aim to get from a cost per client served of $550 today, to $300 by the end of 2025.
3) Invest in Worker Insights Initiative to Solve for Debt – We will invest in our role as an aggregator and advocate of worker voices so TrustPlus can serve as a conduit to influence the financial and employment systems to be more equitable. We envision a symbiotic relationship with workers whereby TrustPlus delivers value to them by offering human-touch, tech-enabled financial solutions, while workers share their data and stories with us so we can ensure their voices are heard and play a role in shaping solutions.
To start, we will build on our data infrastructure with a new data warehouse, new data collection methods, and analytical and data visualization softwares. We will increase our technical capacity to analyze data we already collect such as recorded coaching sessions through audio transcription software, pilot new client survey and interview methods, and implement methods to source Financial Coaches’ tacit knowledge that take the onus off them to identify patterns. Under the leadership of our Vice President of Innovation, we are currently staffing up a team who will collectively be accountable for managing this data and insights engine, establishing an innovation agenda, continually improving our internal practices, and developing new, business-viable and scalable solutions that tackle workers’ indebtedness.
An investment of $7 million in our growth will put an estimated $130 million of hard-earned wages back into the pockets of low-income workers by the end of 2025 and position us to multiply our impact via systemic change. Over the next three years, we will become a force for change for everyday workers, by growing our business customer portfolio, building an at-scale platform of workers, amplifying worker voice with our data and insights engine, and further chartering our path towards our North Star of freedom from debt for all workers.
Our $7 million campaign reflects our projected funding needs to support TrustPlus’ 3-year financial and operational growth model, detailed here. We calculated this number by subtracting our projected revenue of $12.5 million (including already pledged philanthropic support and longtime annual donors, as well as earned revenue) from our total 3-year TrustPlus budget of $19 million. We plan to grow from a 2023 budget of $5.4 million to $6.1 million in 2024 and $7.4 million in 2025. Our long-term financial projections are grounded in our sophisticated multi-year financial plan, which incorporates assumptions about our anticipated fundraising success, customer and user growth, and increased operational efficiencies.
This campaign is focused on ensuring we secure the $7 million in growth capital critical to achieving our competitive, at-scale and sustainable operation, and delivering on our promise of cultivating new systemic change solutions. Your support will put us on track to serve 20,000 TrustPlus clients over the next three years (a 3x increase), reduce the cost per worker served by 180% from $550 to $300, build a portfolio of 160 customers across the country, earn $3.6 million in customer revenue, and increase our sustainability ratio to 60% of operating costs covered by earned revenue. Philanthropy will remain a part of our financial plan, but as we increase our operational efficiency and earned revenue power, we can direct every philanthropic dollar to further growth and innovation.
Our historical financials are available on our website here.
| Goal | Activities | Cost |
| Scale our Customer Portfolio –$2.7 Million | Create a Digital Marketing and Sales Conversion Funnel
|
$1,137,491 |
Expand Sales and Customer Experience Team
|
$525,834 | |
Build Customer Portal
|
$1,032,324 | |
| Achieve Impact at Scale –$2.3 Million | Enhance TrustPlus User Platform
|
$1,549,144 |
Increase Operational Efficiency
*Per Plan Ventures’ Scaling Consultancy. |
$737,701 | |
| Invest in Worker Insights Initiative and New Solutions –$1.9 Million | Build an Automated, Tech-Enabled Data and Insights Engine
|
$1,505,893 |
Build Innovation Team Capacity and Develop New Solutions
|
$409,359 | |
| Total Growth Expenditures | $6,897,758 |
Follow Us