Founder Friday with Simran Kang of MyFO
Leveraging their years of experience and knowledge building in the finance and family office space, co-founders Simran Kang and Alice Chen created MyFO as a platform to help families & individuals start and grow a family office to manage their wealth. As a SaaS tool operating in the FinTech space, the easy-to-use platform provides net worth snapshots, curated guidance, personalized workflows, and secure management and safekeeping of all important information about a family office.
We caught up with Simran to hear what’s new for MyFO, what’s coming up next, insights into what’s happening in the industry, and advice she would give to her past self and up-and-coming women founders.
What’s New
It’s been a busy 2023 for MyFO, having just gone live with their product in August! Since then, they have been busy onboarding a variety of customers onto the platform.
On top of that, the team is also excited to announce that they now have over 20,000 direct connections to different banking and financial institutions across North America.
What’s Next
An updated version of MyFO’s cutting edge AI feature is in the works to launch. Users can ask natural language questions regarding their finances (think: financial health, contracts, wills, insurance documents) and receive detailed and relevant information that they can then take action on.
Also in the pipeline is a scenario modeling tool. This will allow users to mimic buying and selling specific assets and seeing the impact to their financial health and net worth as you divest or invest in certain securities, depending on what you do.
What Simran Is Excited About Right Now
Being recently named in Forbes’ 2023 Family Office Software Roundup, MyFO is proud to lead the way in the latest developments and AI trends in family office management, such as expanded features, better integration, and customization.
The competitive pricing and its accessibility of the platform is a key differentiator of MyFO, allowing them to target a broader audience managing multiple assets with complicated and nuanced details compared to Wealthsimple or other retail solutions.
And unlike those competitive softwares that can take twelve to 18 months to onboard, MyFO’s self-onboarding feature cuts that down to just a matter of hours.
Regarding its AI capabilities, MyFO can perform actions such as looking at investment statements and aggregating that information, offering trend analysis and personalized insights, and more. It can tell you how much capital you’ve committed, what it’s worth, how much capital you have remaining, what those things actually mean, and analyzes any documents for risk or opportunity assessments.
On the trending side of the family office industry, there's a significant transition of wealth happening: younger generations are inheriting more capital, but they don’t know how to manage it or have the right tools. Because of this, they are looking for more digital solutions and opportunities for more ownership over their decision making rather than giving capital to one person to manage it for them.
MyFO is in an advantageous position around this, enabling individuals to manage multiple different asset classes. Thanks to the integrated AI, the platform acts more as an agnostic advisor and not as an advisor trying to sell you on a product or retain more of your assets under management (AUM).
Additionally, more women are managing family offices than ever. With that, more power is in the hands of women and the types of decisions and investments they are making, as well as an upward trend toward investing in opportunities tailored to women.
Advice to Your Past Self & Other Women Founders
“Women need to follow their gut and continue to persevere, " Simran says. “All the women founders I meet have just a tremendous amount of grit because we experience “no” more than anybody else, and we experience way more hurdles. And as you know, less than 2% of funding goes towards women, and yet we still make it, and we still build these amazing businesses.”
When looking back at this amazing business you built, you can’t truly appreciate how far you’ve come without acknowledging everything you experienced along the way—all the big and small milestones, the seemingly impossible hurdles, and the failures where you had to pick yourself back up. Remember that in the end, it all counts for something.
So when asked to give advice to five-years-ago her, Simran shares, “I hate having to go back and give myself advice because I think everything's a learning process, and had I not had the experiences I did, I wouldn't have ended up where I am.”
But when it comes to passing on advice today to women founders everywhere: you may not know what the right decision is, so make the best decision you possibly can. Especially when you’re in a new space, look for the people and networks you can trust to give you the right guidance.
Just keep going, and eventually you will find people that will help you.