CUSTOMER Q&A: THE BEANS

The Beans is a financial services company that helps employees in caring industries, such as healthcare and education, manage their finances and achieve financial balance. Through a personal finance app, it uses visual aids to help users simplify their path to financial success. 

The Beans offers services like professional development, automated cash flow and savings plans, and community support. It was designed to help alleviate employees' number one stressor: money. 

In this interview from Plaid Effects, we speak with Melissa Pancoast, Co-Founder and CEO of The Beans, about what drove her to help people reduce their financial stress and how Plaid helps her achieve that mission. 

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Plaid: Tell us about The Beans and how the idea came about.

Pancoast: At the Beans, we help reduce employee turnover in the caring professions by solving the number one source of employee stress—their finances. We build personal financial automation solutions that take away the burden of executing everyday financial tasks. 

I taught 1st and 5th grade in New York City and dealt with financial stress myself. I then went back to school and studied financial stress because I saw the pressure it put on my colleagues and the families we were working with. 

At Oxford, I developed Proven, the first program with pharmaceutical-grade evidence on how to reduce financial stress. Then, I moved to the Bay Area to figure out how to build a software company so we could cost-effectively scale that program. 

Plaid: Tell me more about the leap from teaching to where you are now. What was your ‘aha moment’? 

Pancoast: I saw financial stress as a first principles problem, the thing really getting in the way. It’s also a public health emergency and the number one cause of stress in America. Understanding that, I thought, “This is what I need to invest my time in understanding and moving the needle on.”

Plaid: What are some of the services that The Beans offers its customers?

Pancoast: We build personal financial automation, and we’re especially excited about the automation piece. This is where we’re able to deliver value to our community by removing the burden of everyday financial tasks.

Everything we build is based on three principles: money, life, and balance. These are the three things that have been proven with rock-solid evidence to promote financial progress and reduce financial stress. They are to have a plan, build savings, and spend in alignment with values. 

We use Plaid to bring in data to make the world’s first automated cash flow plan. The platform connects to your account, analyzes your historical earning and spending trends, and builds a personalized cash flow plan that automatically updates. From here we move to the second principle, which is to build savings. 

We recommend what you can save based on your earnings, spending, and debt burden—all things that Plaid provides to us so we can have that visibility. We tell you what you can save per paycheck and offer to move that money to your savings account for you. 

Plaid: Amazing. So why the name, The Beans? 

Pancoast: We're named The Beans because the work that I led at Oxford and in Southern Africa used dried beans and corn to make visual financial maps for people. The name reminds us of our roots in that space and keeps us honest about where we came from. Plus, it's fun. People like it.

Plaid: Why did you choose Plaid to help you start your business? 

Pancoast: I chose Plaid in 2015 because it was really easy to get started. Back then, it was me and a friend who was a software engineer working nights and weekends. We were experimenting in the sandbox, and it was remarkably simple. Since then, Plaid’s been an incredible partner every step of the way. 

Plaid: How do you see your business growing in the next five years, and how can Plaid support that?

Pancoast: We expect massive growth in the next five years, serving more members of the caring professions. That includes teachers, healthcare professionals, people working at non-profits, and government employees across the country. Plaid has been our trusted partner in serving our customers and community by building automatic cash flow plans for them.

As we grow across the country, we trust Plaid to support us with the data access we need to run the product. Plaid connects with community banks and big banks. That means we can serve all of our community. 

Plaid: Do you have a favorite customer story you can share with us? 

Pancoast: Definitely. I love our customer stories. We get emails, text messages, and phone calls that tell us about The Beans' impact. 

One of my favorite stories is about a teacher in Atlanta. Her name is Zinzi, and she found The Beans through her employer. She made her first financial plan and realized that the way she was living her day-to-day life didn’t match up with that plan. She got out of bankruptcy two years early and says that it’s because she made a plan with The Beans. 

Plaid: How has using Plaid promoted a sense of trust and security for your customers

Every customer asks me about trust and security. They are employers, and they have to make a decision about the security of employee data. I need to explain easily why we trust Plaid to provide us with this information. Being able to point to a trusted third party that handles that responsibility has made it easier to calm our customers’ concerns about trust and security.