Barclays’ and Starling’s Former Executive Megan Caywood Cooper to Launch Ai Wealthtech

Megan Caywood Cooper, a former Chief Product Officer at Barclays and a Chief Platform Officer at Starling, just announced the launch of her new AI wealthtech known simply as Caywood.

She previously announced this on X back on May 10, but without giving away any details, stating simply that she will announce more about it in the near future.

The Next Step In Digital Banking

Cooper’s announcement came yesterday during Money 20/20, and she described her new startup as a wealthtech platform and a product that relies on the use of artificial intelligence to provide financial guidance. Her service will be unique by being able to provide personalized guidance for each customer, and more than that, it will be given to them in real-time.

During her speech, Cooper also looked back at her experiences at major UK banks like Barclays and Starling over the last ten years, which enabled her to recognize what is likely to be the next step in digital banking.

She explained her views by saying that the first phase of digitization was about automation, meaning that this step is to make it easier to access digital banking services. However, the next phase will be augmentation, or creating better services for the customers.

According to Cooper, this will be a fundamentally different user experience, like nothing they have had a chance to see so far. “AI and APIs have matured in a powerful way such that we can now harness this technology to provide customers with real-time personalized financial guidance in a way that we were unable to do before,” she explained.

Caywood Features And Helping Customers Make Better Financial Decisions

Her presentation included a detailed list of services and features that Caywood would be able to offer. This included things like smart financial aggregation, cashflow forecasting and modeling, financial summary and budget outlines, AI-driven financial planning, smart budgets, tax optimization, open APIs and development platforms, as well as automatic portfolio management.

Out of all the features, tax optimization stood out to many, and Cooper highlighted it specifically, explaining that this is based on the premise that many individuals do not know which specific financial instruments can help them in reaching their goals.

This comes as no surprise, as different products come with different allowances and government incentives, so it truly takes an expert to have a proper grasp of all the available benefits for different products and investment methods, including the tax status surrounding each of them.

However, Cooper’s new service will be able to tackle the issue. She also said that one key thing she plans to focus on is helping customers make better financial decisions. “The reality is that making banking more convenient didn’t solve that alone, in fact, it probably raised expectations. So now what we’re focusing on is leveraging this new technology across AI and APIs to give people personalized financial advice when they need it,” she concluded.