BIG News

Leawood’s Blooom Adopts B2C-Only Strategy

Leawood’s blooom – a startup that helps customers automatically manage their 401(k)s – is switching up its strategy and saying goodbye to its president.

According to an article by Suleman Din at Financial Planning, blooom will target individual consumers only instead of sponsors of retirement plans. It’s also cutting 10 positions, and President Greg Smith is leaving – though “on good terms,” he told Din.

Thinking Bigger Business magazine featured blooom as a cover story in late 2015. While the move to being exclusively B2C is news, it also fits with the company’s long-term mission: guiding average investors as they try to build long-term wealth.

Each month, nearly 90 million Americans put money into their 401(k) accounts, with the hope their savings will grow large enough to cover their eventual retirement.

Unfortunately, most of these people have no idea what they’re doing. They’re forced to choose precisely where to invest their money, usually with no expert help. Many end up allocating their funds to the wrong kinds of assets. And that can have significant consequences over the long term.

Chris Costello, Kevin Conard and Randy AufDerHeide co-founded blooom in March 2013 to address this problem. The startup’s online service analyzes a customer’s 401(k) holdings and offers an optimized investment strategy to manage the account for their clients.

Blooom has raised more than $13 million, including a $9.15 million Series B round in early February, Crunchbase reports.

The company has also won a series of awards, including being named one of “The World’s Top 10 Most Innovative Companies on 2015 in Personal Finance” by Fast Company. It’s a past winner of LaunchKC and the Kauffman Foundation’s One in a Million pitch contest.