Hi there! Before I introduce CacheFlo, I’d like to tell you a bit more about myself, which will give you a better idea about how CacheFlo came to be.
I'm Stephanie Holmes-Winton, CEO & Founder of CacheFlo and creator of the Certified Cash Flow Specialists (CCS) Designation Program. I started in the financial services industry in 2001 as a financial advisor. Despite the fact that the debt to income ratio was lower than it is today, most of my clients then felt like they didn’t know where their money was going! Sounds familiar, right? Nobody was offering them the advice they needed to manage their debt and spending. As I searched for a solution within the industry, it seemed like traditional budgeting tips and spreadsheets were the only options available. And guess what? They weren’t working.
Today, there are a lot of financial apps that can categorize banking transactions. However, examining past behaviour only shows you where the money went, it doesn’t show you how to change going forward. For example, reminding someone, they spent $200 on coffee last month makes them feel guilty. It’s been my professional experience that making people feel bad about past financial decisions doesn’t help them make better decisions in the future.
Learn
I had discovered first hand that there were significant gaps in professional financial education. After hearing complaints from other advisors who were seeking similar solutions, I decided this was somewhere I could make a difference. After testing several training programs, the Certified Cash Flow Specialist (CCS) designation was officially launched in 2013. The CCS designation offered cash flow and debt management advice that the industry was missing.
Currently, CacheFlo Learn offers a wide range of courses for professionals to develop behavioural cash flow management skills. Accessible anywhere and from any device, our courses aim to make financial education easy, interactive and fun. Whether professionals enroll in the CCS designation or individual courses, they can learn at their own pace.
We are currently revamping our CCS designation and adding more courses, so stay tuned for updates!
Advise
Shortly after releasing the CCS designation, we determined a smarter tool was needed to help professionals implement our process. Through multiple iterations, our professional tool CacheFlo Advise came to life!
Right now, Advise is available in both the US and Canada and continues to grow with numerous releases going out each month. Here are a few key features:
- Spendable suggestions and automated money found calculations. Advisors know what is safe to prescribe to their clients to spend on variable expenses and save or invest in their clients' financial goals sustainably.
- Customizable refinancing options, which supports numerous financial products.
- Full reporting to clearly capture a cash flow strategy.
- Drag & drop email editor to make fully customizable client engage emails.
- Connection into our client-facing app, Winton, which allows professionals to provide personalized advice easily accessible on a client's device.
Hey Winton
Our CacheFlo Suite (CacheFlo Learn & Advise) help a lot of advisors help their clients, but we recognized something more was needed for their clients. We identified that a client-facing application that can provide personalized spending advice from their financial advisor or institution was needed. So, in mid-2019, we created Winton!
Winton provides essential spending advice and identifies how much cash flow the user could free up by following its recommendations. Winton also gives people full transparency and control over who has access to their financial information and can give advice, which we at CacheFlo care a lot about. Financial professionals with an Advise account can overwrite Winton's recommendations to provide more personalized advice with the correct permissions set by their client.
We continue to develop Advise and Winton's capabilities to provide better advice. In the end, our goal is to help people predict the consequences of big financial decisions before they make them, and help professionals make informed recommendations. Both humans and bots work together to keep spending in check.
Thanks for reading about our journey, and I’ll end with a quote:
Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.
- Margaret Mead
