1% Club launches AI CFO to offer personalised financial guidance to users

MUMBAI: Your money may soon have a new sounding board. Finance creator and entrepreneur Sharan Hegde’s 1% Club has launched an AI CFO, a technology-led tool designed to provide personalised guidance across everyday financial decisions.

The launch marks a shift for 1% Club, which has built its business around financial education and is now moving deeper into fintech and technology-led personal finance services.

The AI CFO is designed to understand an individual’s financial situation and use that context to help them assess decisions around spending, saving, investments and wealth creation. Rather than functioning as a conventional financial information service, the company is positioning it as an AI agent that can work with a user’s broader financial picture.

Users can ask questions such as whether they can afford to buy a car next year or how much they need to save each month for a holiday. The AI CFO can assess their existing cash flow and provide guidance on how their spending or savings may need to change.

The tool uses information such as cash flow, net worth, portfolio and holdings, alongside 1% Club’s research, to provide recommendations without requiring users to manually enter all their financial details.

The AI CFO also offers portfolio reviews across eight parameters, including returns, fund quality, benchmark performance, allocation, concentration, overlap, costs and tax position. It can additionally surface news and insights relevant to a user’s mutual funds or stocks.

For Hegde, the move represents a progression from teaching people about money to helping them navigate actual financial decisions.

“For the last three years, we have been helping people learn how money works. But education is only the first step,” 1% Club founder Sharan Hegde said.

“The real challenge begins when you have to make decisions with your own money,” he added, saying the company wanted to build a product that could understand a user’s financial context and help them think through those decisions.

1% Club co-founder Raghav Gupta said the product is aimed at addressing a gap between the growing availability of financial products and the personalised guidance available to consumers.

“India has hundreds of millions of people who are financially active but have no one they trust to guide them through money decisions,” 1% Club co-founder Raghav Gupta said.

The company’s expansion follows a Rs 10 crore pre-Series A investment from Gruhas in 2023. Gruhas was co-founded by Nikhil Kamath and Abhijeet Pai.

Since that investment, 1% Club said it has generated more than Rs 150 crore in revenue over three years while maintaining strong profit after tax margins. Its financial education ecosystem has reached close to one million students.

The company has also expanded beyond education, with approximately Rs 2,000 crore in assets under advisory and more than Rs 4,000 crore in client assets tracked on its platform.

That expansion gives the AI CFO a wider base of financial products and user information to work with as 1% Club attempts to build a broader personal finance ecosystem.

The launch comes as consumers increasingly use AI for information, planning and decision-making. Financial guidance, however, brings a higher bar for relevance and trust, particularly when recommendations are based on an individual’s income, assets, investments and spending.

1% Club is betting that combining personal financial context with AI can make financial guidance more accessible and actionable. The company sees the AI CFO as an early step towards a technology layer that can stay with users across different stages of their financial lives.

The move effectively takes 1% Club from explaining money to helping users make sense of what to do with it, as the company looks to turn financial education into a more personalised fintech experience.