EXCLUSIVE- Simplicity. If there’s one word that describes the abiding value of investment platform Acorns’ innovation strategy, that’s the word, according to its CEO Noah Kerner, who is currently gearing up to launch Acorns Later in the coming weeks.

Based on the simplicity principle, Acorns Later is an automated IRA account, tax-advantaged retirement account that requires as little as $5 investment per month.

Kerner describes it as the first automated retirement “for the up and coming,” in which Acorns recommends a type of retirement product based on a user’s financial situation.

“One of the things we wanted to do is remove as much friction as possible,” Kerner said, “and one of the drivers of inertia when it comes to saving for retirement is that IRAs are confusing.”

Part of removing this confusion is simplifying the available options.

For Acorns’ core investment product, those options are categorized based on a customer’s risk-tolerance ranging from conservative portfolios to aggressive.

That mantra of keeping of things simple seems to be working for the San Francisco-based investment platform, which in January 2018 alone amassed 270K users.

To put things in perspective, Kerner points to Acorns’ 125K users in January 2017 (that’s a 116% year-over-year increase).

Kerner attributes this growth to several reasons: Acorns referral program, its retail partners in its Acorns Found Money program, and a recent partnership with payments platform PayPal.

“We are at 75% penetration of PayPal’s US customer base,” he told Bank Innovation.

But while keeping things simple has its advantages, it also prevents Acorns from providing investors with certain nuances.

For instance, Acorns does not give users the options of investing in socially responsible portfolios, like its New York-based peer Betterment.

“The more options you add,” Kerner said, “the more possibility, people do not invest. At Acorns, we ask only a few questions. And based on a spectrum of risk. We’ve eliminated cumbersome product choices and complicated processes. Our whole mission revolves around hard working Americans, we look at who this customer is, and what they want. And that’s how we plan out our roadmap to give more texture to this mission.”

Aside from Acorns Later, which currently has about 340K customers on the waitlist, Acorns just added a Found Money browser extension – a Google Chrome Browser extension that shows a user if a certain retailer is an Acorns’ Found Money retail partner on the retailer’s website.

Acorns Later is set to launch this spring. No specific date was disclosed.