Fintech Playbook helps Gen Z and Millennials optimize their tax
- Playbook is a personal finance app for high-earning Gen Z and Millennials.
- David Hegarty, former CEO of Credit Karma, founded the startup in 2021.
- Playbook used this 13-page pitch deck to raise a $7 million Series A.
This fintech is helping Gen Z and Millennials save millions by optimizing their taxes.
Playbook is a personal finance app for high-earning Gen Z and Millennials, meaning 25- to 45-year-olds with salaries over $100,000 and high disposable income. It helps this population of top customers save money through tax optimization – reducing the amount of tax they pay by leveraging the existing legal framework.
“What Playbook is doing is actually what a wealth advisor would tell high-income 30-year-olds to do, which is not try to beat the market,” David Hegarty, founder and CEO of Playbook, told Insider.
Instead, it’s about focusing on “minimizing the taxes you’ll pay on those investments,” he added.
Playbook users create a personal profile and the startup calculates how much they can save. The app then helps the user set up investment accounts, such as an IRA or Roth IRA, and automates payments into those accounts, filling up the most optimized accounts first and dropping in the rest. On average, the startup helps increase a user’s future net worth by about $1.3 million, according to Hegarty.
Hegarty was previously director of product management for the personal loan business at Credit Karma. He has also appeared on Shark Tank with his app called Fixed, which helps users fight parking fines.
Playbook has raised $12.6 million to date. Most recently, it announced a $7 million Series A round on March 29, led by Telstra Ventures. A spokesperson for Playbook declined to share the startup’s current valuation
Beat the taxman
Hegarty worked at Microsoft after completing his MBA. He was offered a 401(k) matching program, but he didn’t take it simply because he didn’t understand what it was.
“I always describe Playbook as the app I wish I had in my twenties,” Hegarty said.
When he joined Atomic in 2020, a venture studio and fund, he spent much of his time talking to people who worked in Silicon Valley and realized they were no more educated in personal finance than he was in his twenties.
“I just had an epiphany that these people don’t know what they’re doing with their finances either, but they have a pretty good income and pretty high disposable income, and that masks what they don’t know,” Hegarty said.
The Playbook is for people who are financially competent but don’t know where to start when it comes to saving, Hegarty said. The startup has around 75,000 users and gets almost 40% of its customers from TikTok and Instagram. About 10% of people who sign up for the app convert to a subscription, which costs $29 per month.
Going forward, Hegarty wants to offer tax-optimized investments and advanced tax products such as IRA Plus, life insurance and employee shares.
“Philosophically, what we believe is that it’s hard to beat the market, but easy to beat the tax man,” Hegarty said. “And the best thing you can do to build your wealth is just figure out how to pay less in taxes.”
