Honest Dollar seeks to make financial services transparent, plans 2015 launch

by Julianne Tveten
November 26, 2014

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An enterprising developer and a financial planner meet, get along, and devise a plan to reform the financial industry. It might sound like some investment banker's attempt at a screenplay, but it's the genesis of Honest Dollar.

Launching in 2015, Honest Dollar is the brainchild of William Hurley (known in tech communities as “whurley”), a former Apple developer and founder of Austin mobile software studio Chaotic Moon, and Henry Yoshida, a Principal of The Maresh Yoshida 401k Group, an Austin-based retirement plan consulting firm. The two are mum on details, but they've revealed that the venture’s mission is to make the investment process more transparent.

“We both realized that technology has the ability to make dramatic improvements in the financial services industry,” Yoshida said. “With my specific expertise in the finance field...combined with whurley's technology background, specifically his ability to create and use software as a means to make complexity simple, we felt that there is a real opportunity to create an amazing company together.”

Hurley and Yoshida contend that the financial services industry has become an antiquated machine, both in terms of business operations and technology. With Honest Dollar, the two intend to effect infrastructural change.

“Let's face it: the financial services industry is an outdated business model running outdated technologies. It's time to rebuild it from the ground up instead of just giving it another facelift, which is all that's really happened in the past 50 years,” Hurley explained.

As they prepare to launch, whurley said, profitability is Honest Dollar's first priority.  

“We'd like to reach profitability within the first six to 18 months--possibly much sooner. It all depends on how fast we have to scale the business. We already have customer interest and we've only taken the first few steps in founding and funding the company so expectations are considerably higher than we set out with a week ago.”

Honest Dollar will debut on March 14 at the SXSW Interactive 2015 conference, where Hurley and Yoshida will present their business model and target customers. “We'll be bringing the first in a series of new fintech [Financial Technology] products to market,” Hurley said.

Jobs at Honest Dollar

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