Bank of America released Life Plan, a new personal finance tool, on Monday, in a bid to help customers identify their financial goals and track progress in real time.

The tool, available online and via mobile, takes customers through a workflow that establishes goals across finance, family, health, home, work and donations. Using customer data the bank already has, in conjunction with AI-powered insights from the bank’s virtual assistant Erica, customers are proactively fed “bite-sized” actions to help achieve their goals, said David Tyrie, head of digital, financial center strategy, and advanced client solutions. Progress is tracked with personalized guidance and recommendations, and the platform is designed so a customer can transition from self-service to obtaining help from an advisor who can see the customer’s Life Plan in real time.
“This is essentially taking every piece of content that is in the Bank of America experience — all the products, services — and just personalizing it so it’s relevant to you. Think of it as a way to aggregate the most relevant information as you’re thinking about a specific life priority,” Tyrie said.
Bank of America, which has $2.6 trillion in assets, joins a crowded field of personal finance products already in market; Royal Bank of Canada has been expanding its use of personalized insights gleaned by AI assistant NOMI across its mobile app, while fintechs Digit and MoneyLion have built out their personal finance and banking products, and robo-advisers Betterment and Wealthfront continue to move farther into personal finance management.
The bank is hoping its approach to financial planning, which is rooted in life goals rather than “how much money do you have and how do you want to invest it,” should differentiate it from its competitors, said Evelyn Varner, Bank of America senior vice president of advanced solutions and digital banking.
Competition aside, because Erica is embedded into the platform, “the more people use it, the smarter we get,” Tyrie said. “We’ve already mapped out three future versions of Life Plan; this is version one, and we’ll be committed to this for a long time,” he added.
While he didn’t give details on versions two and three, which he said are already mapped out, Tyrie did say the platform will be advanced in the same way the bank developed Erica. It will start with basic tasks like retrieving information, and then evolve to execute actions and provide insights. “We’ll be committed to this for a long time,” he added. While the bank intends to add more content and capabilities for its higher net worth customers, it wanted to start with the everyday customer, he said.
The new tool will push the bank to make inroads with its younger consumers.
Throughout its eight-month pilot with nearly 80,000 customers, Bank of America saw Life Plan gained the most traction with the younger consumer, “who doesn’t have the benefit of handholding of their advisor right now, and is looking for advice and guidance,” Varner said. “When we see what they’re clicking on, the objectives there … it tends to be people who look like they need help adulting,” she said, adding that common goals were based around budgeting, saving and financing a car for the first time.






