Financial advisory services often aren’t targeted at the people at the lower end of the economic spectrum — and arguably, those are the folks who really need money advice the most.
That’s where Scaffold, an app built over the past 24 hours at the TechCrunch Disrupt NYC Hackathon, wants to help out. Scaffold aims to be a financial advisory platform that can give actionable insights to lower income users who are particularly vulnerable to financial risk, such as people just coming out of homeless shelters or single mothers who are coming out of battered women shelters.
As you can see in the video of the one-minute onstage demo embedded above, Scaffold lets people set up web video meetups with financial advisors to give them targeted, personalized metrics about their financial risk. The site will also show in plain English the client’s biggest risks through “stress tests” that show what would happen if he or she lost a job, or had an accident — these make it clear to people who aren’t necessarily money-savvy just how important it is to get their financial houses in order.
It’s a somewhat more serious-minded app than you might expect to come out of an overnight hackathon, so it’s not as fully baked as others launching here today: Scaffold’s creators Gabe Kneisley and Kevin Wolkober told me that at the moment the app does not actually let you fill in your financial information, since they haven’t had the time to make sure it’s completely secure. But it’s fun to see a big idea that’s aiming to have an important impact taking root here in a matter of hours.
I talked to Kneisley and Wokober backstage, and you can watch that in the video embedded below.