When Elizabeth Clubb found herself helping with financial caregiving toward the end of her father’s life, she saw that, as a former professor, he was surrounded by lots of people — caregivers, family, past students.
“His solution for, really, expenses … when he couldn’t do those things himself was to give whoever was there in his life his checkbook,” she said. “That is not a good solution.”
Credit: Tim Redman
Credit: Tim Redman
Clubb kept an eye on her father’s accounts, but his fear about his finances produced anxiety in her, too.
“(It was) very stressful for me not knowing what was happening and very stressful for him, and the worst part, for me, was that he was sort of living in fear at the end of his life,” she said. “The last years of his life, he was living in fear of being defrauded or being taken advantage of, which he was.”
Clubb is now CEO of MyFloc, an Atlanta-based financial platform designed to help users, many of them older adults, manage their finances while involving their support networks in a transparent manner. Where seniors are involved, the concept aims to reduce stress and to let users focus more on caregiving, Clubb explained.
A deeper dive
When her father passed away, Clubb was already working in the aging space, and she felt led to innovate in a way that would support members of the older population.
”I sort of did a much deeper dive into the space to understand the problem of elder fraud and elder financial exploitation and all of the other components of financial caregiving that go into it, both for the older adult but for the rest of the family. And so, the inspiration for MyFloc was really to look at those points of friction ... across the process, and try to eliminate them as much as possible,” she said.
The platform allows United States-based users to set up a new, FDIC-insured account online. Users range from 13 years and up, but older adults can preserve their privacy without revealing all their financial information to caregivers and family. Primary users fund a MyFloc account from an external checking account and have cards for spending. Surrounding participants, such as caregivers, financial planners, family and friends, hold varying roles that allow them to do things such as help with account management, hold prepaid cards to help with purchases, or simply view what’s going on without having spending privileges.
“What this does is it allows all these people in what we call the tapestry of care to be on this platform together,” Clubb said. “It makes the invisible visible. What we do is prevent financial fraud before it happens by allowing a lot of people to see what’s going on.”
Challenge and growth
Clubb and her co-founders, Jason Thomas and Tommy Marshall, began the building process for the platform in 2020.
“We started, actually, in earnest right at the beginning of COVID, so that’s a challenge,” she said. “Now, we have people on the platform using the product, but it took a couple of years to build it, and that’s one of the challenges in the entrepreneurial space is it’s never as fast as you want it to be.”
They also found financial management needs in the aging space are diverse.
“It’s not one size fits all,” Clubb said. “There’s a tendency in this country to block everyone 65 and above into one big demographic, which is just completely false.”
Feedback from users has helped them develop the platform over time, she said, which has resulted in more useability and agency for seniors.
“We’re very much about empowering people, families, and older adults and not taking away their agency as older adults,” she said.
MyFloc is an Advanced Technology Development Center portfolio company and an AARP Innovation Labs Portfolio Company. Visit MyFloc.com for more information.
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