Q&A: The next era of financial assistance

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New year, new dough? 🍾

Maybe, if you make the right decisions. 

That’s where the financial assistance of the future comes in, argues Ethan Bloch, founder and co-CEO of Hiro Finance.

The gist: After building and successfully exiting the automated savings app Digit, Ethan Bloch co-founded and co-leads AI financial planner Hiro alongside Rushabh Doshi (who’s also ex-senior director of product management at then-Facebook). 

The venture-backed Hiro uses a large-language model (in other words, what chatbots use to communicate—but this one has a targeted use case) to answer all kinds of personal finance questions and help you draw out a portfolio that helps you reach your financial + life goals.

Enjoy a convo with Ethan and I about why tech eclipses what we once thought of as personalized financial advice, how to know when (and when not) to trust AI and why Ethan is proud to eat his own dog food (that’s startup speak for “using your own product”) — all after this quick ad. Simply click it to support this newsletter, tip me and share with your friends.

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Rachel: I've written in the past about "AI washing," and it seems to me that Hiro goes a little bit deeper and that it's more built into what you're doing. Can you talk about how Hiro's AI features actually impact a person's finances?

Ethan: Everything says AI now, so it means almost nothing. It's so out of control. In the case of Hiro, we can just put the AI term completely aside. 

Everyone's financial life is a unique gem. Today, if you go use a robo advisor or another piece of financial software, or you go to a human advisor, you wind up getting pretty cookie cutter advice. 

With Hiro, it's possible for anyone to get a completely unique plan, process, advice that maps to your unique financial situation. It enables you to have more confidence in a financial decision that you're contemplating. 

For example, we had a client write us recently, she signed up for Hiro, and because Hiro will answer your seven million questions you might have with zero judgment, because it can give you this super unique plan while you're on your couch Netflixing, she was able to get to a place where she quit her job and could actually take time off because she finally felt confident in her financial future. Maybe she would have got there without Hiro, but she got there way faster because she could use Hiro.

Is the technology making any actions on behalf of these individuals, or is it just giving insight on what to do next?

It takes actions in the sense that you're describing your goals and it's manipulating a pretty complex financial model. Today, Hiro won't actually move money on your behalf or buy and sell investments on your behalf. Maybe at some point it will.

So much of the conversation around AI and automation is keeping the human in the loop. In my last edition, I discussed how to know when it's safe to trust algorithms. I'm sure at this point, when you're talking about personal investments, people feel more comfortable having some semblance of control, but still having that support. Is that something you’ve found in your work?

Yeah, something that’s become really clear is the number one problem people have right now is they actually don't know what to do. Do I have the right portfolio? Should I change it? That's the big unknown. 

People are more and more comfortable buying and selling securities themselves these days. Just knowing what you should do is the starting place. And by the way, once you know what portfolio you should have, the complexity around knowing what to do doesn't end there, because getting from A to B is hard when there are multiple accounts and tax implications. 

If we're thinking about the next era of financial assistance with this new year ahead of us, how can people know whether a technology is trustworthy or not? What are the capabilities and limitations of this category of tech, and where is it going next? 

At baseline, if you're trying to understand the implications of a financial decision—a career path, job change, location change, house purchase—you should be using AI, and not just Hiro. If you're not using it, you're doing yourself a disservice, because it enables everyone to have this back and forth conversation with themselves, but also with the AI in a way that sharpens your thinking. 

The caveat here, though, is: by and large, you shouldn't treat this as the oracle. This is a really smart friend who you can bounce ideas off of, which is going to sharpen your thinking. But you shouldn't just take what your friend says and execute it, because your friend doesn't understand everything about you. 

When it comes to making fine-grained financial decisions, use a product where the math is verifiable. If you use ChatGPT to do this, it's very hard to get the math to be verifiable. It's kind of just vibes. Hiro has been purpose-built to pair a large language model with an actual rigorous, code-determined financial model. That enables you to inspect every assumption, check and see how it arrived at the conclusion, and get transparency. 

When it comes to trusted AI, you need to be able to verify it and to draw a corollary. In biotechnology, they're using large language models and AI to come up with new molecules, but they also build it on a verifiable framework. They're not just vibing out a new protein, so we borrowed some of those great ideas at Hiro.

It seems like, aside from changing your portfolio or whathaveyou, this technology gives you the chance to be more educated about your finances as you approach things like buying a house, starting a business, maybe moving in with a partner.

Exactly. These are giant financial decisions, and we now have a pretty smart friend to bounce ideas off of who's completely non-judgmental. It's hard to be vulnerable with a human.

That's been a big conversation, even around the general purpose chatbots like ChatGPT, because people don't feel the shame. Without a specific use case, that can lead to a whole slew of its own issues like AI psychosis. But because this is more purpose-built, then you're able to stay within the bounds of the app’s intentions. 

Now, out of curiosity, are you metaphorically eating your own dog food?

Absolutely. My financial plan is in Hiro, and I'm tracking my spending with Hiro, and so is the team. 

I've had what I call a net worth forecast in my life since my late 20s. I spent all this time building this super complex spreadsheet. Over time, I've updated it, and it shows me my net worth over the next 45 years and all my cash flows and assumptions in it. It was always so painful to go into the spreadsheet and make sure I had everything connected right. I don't have that spreadsheet anymore. I just use Hiro.

Heading into 2026, healthcare costs are increasing and inflation continues to rise. Everything's becoming more high-pressure for people. Having something that can help you see, ‘Okay, we're going to be all right, for now at least,’ I'm sure is a relief for people.

You feel way more in control, even if it's a tough situation, even if it's bad news—which a lot of people maybe don't want to see, but they always feel better afterwards because you ultimately feel more in control.

Final thoughts from Ethan Bloch:

Now's a really good time to take a few minutes, reflect on what's happened in 2025 for you financially, and then spend some time thinking about where you want to go in 2026. Are you still in the right job? Are you with the right partner? The big questions that we've avoided, now's the time to set yourself up. I'm not a big goal believer, but just spend the time reflecting on what happened, and start dreaming a little bit about where you want to continue to go.

Thanks,