Clarity Money

Clarity Money was a New York-based consumer personal finance application founded by Adam Dell, a serial entrepreneur and former venture investor. The app let users monitor daily spending, manage and cancel subscriptions, negotiate or lower bills, set up automated savings accounts, apply for lower credit card rates and access loans. It positioned itself as a consumer advocate that provided transparency into users' financial lives rather than only reporting financial history.

The product used machine learning, artificial intelligence and data science to identify specific actions users could take to reduce spending or lower costs, and applied behavioural-economics techniques — breaking personal finance into small, manageable steps and, for example, prompting users to pay off their smallest debt first — to reduce cognitive load and encourage action. The company launched out of beta in January 2017 and planned to expand its feature set and add an Android version following its Series B.

Goldman Sachs acquired Clarity Money in 2018 for $100 million. Adam Dell subsequently served as Head of Product at Marcus by Goldman Sachs and as a Partner at Goldman Sachs. The standalone app was discontinued on March 5, 2021, with selected capabilities — including linking external accounts to view balances and transactions in one place and merchant-level spending widgets — carried into Marcus Insights, offered free and without requiring a Marcus bank account.

Founding story

Adam Dell, who had previously founded three other companies and worked as a venture investor, identified personal finance as a sector he expected technology to change and chose to build the company himself. He created an early prototype with a freelance designer found on 99designs, sketching screens and assembling them in InVision, then circulated the prototype for feedback. Skeptics who initially said the space was already covered by incumbents such as Mint responded positively once they could see a tangible product, and Dell credits that early model with the app's eventual traction.

Business model

Consumer-facing mobile personal finance application; the company was categorised as a consumer subscription model. Following the Goldman Sachs acquisition, the product acted as a channel into Marcus by Goldman Sachs deposit accounts, and the successor Marcus Insights tools were offered free of charge without requiring a bank account.

Traction

Within roughly three months of its January 2017 launch, the app had analysed more than $10 billion in transactions and reported average savings of about $300 per customer.

Latest developments

In a February 2021 letter to customers, founder Adam Dell and Marcus by Goldman Sachs Head of Product Sonali Divilek announced the Clarity Money app would be discontinued as of March 5, 2021, with account-linking and spending-analysis widgets integrated into Marcus Insights.