Ray Martinez learned about money the hard way. He would rather students didn’t.

Ray Martinez got through college before he got comfortable with money. He had worked part-time jobs, had parents who set an example, and had earned a degree from Bowdoin. Then came San Francisco, a first job, and the practical examination for which life rarely supplies a revision guide: budgeting and credit card debt. Tuition, it turns out, does not cover every lesson.

He has been candid about learning those subjects through experience. Looking back in 2010, he said he would have appreciated the kind of financial education his company was beginning to deliver. That admission gives his career a useful starting point. The executive selling the value of money lessons had once needed them himself. The distance between a college credential and everyday financial confidence was familiar territory.

Today Martinez is co-founder and CEO of Everfi, which brings digital education into schools and communities through partnerships with businesses and financial institutions. His particular contribution has been to make financial education something a bank can support and a classroom can actually use. The ambition has a practical shape: help students encounter the vocabulary of money before they have to sign for its consequences.

Spencer, Massachusetts, meets the FAFSA

Martinez grew up in Spencer, a rural Massachusetts community, in a multiracial Latinx family. Teachers, coaches and relatives encouraged him toward college. Conversations at home introduced banking and money, and he worked through the financial aid application with his father. The FAFSA is a rather bureaucratic threshold to a new life; it still has to be crossed.

He became the first person in his immediate family to graduate from college. Bowdoin changed his prospects, though he has acknowledged that he did not yet know how he would repay the debt. His account allows two things to sit together: the value of education and the uncertainty of paying for it. Neither makes the other disappear.

That combination explains the attention he gives to access. Encouragement mattered in his own life, and so did people willing to help him navigate an unfamiliar process. A lesson on college financing can be dry on a screen. For a family trying to imagine the next four years, the same information can make an intimidating decision easier to discuss.

“Graduating from Bowdoin College changed my life.”Ray Martinez · 2021

Three Polar Bears, one education business

Bowdoin also supplied relationships that would become part of his working life. Martinez graduated in 1996, the same class as Jon Chapman; fellow Everfi co-founder Tom Davidson graduated in 1994. Davidson later recalled Chapman wanting to recruit Martinez as soon as the young company could afford to bring him aboard. There was a history before there was an executive team.

Davidson remembered Martinez as a college quarterback. More directly useful to the business was the operational experience Martinez brought from Kaplan, where he spent 11 years managing supplemental education programs. Davidson described a complementary arrangement: his own background in policy and finance alongside colleagues who understood education operations, people and business growth.

Everfi dates its founding to 2008. By April 2010, the three founders were ringing the Nasdaq bell as the company marked a network of more than 2,000 schools. A bell is a gratifying object for a young business to ring. The less photogenic work was getting a lesson into a classroom and giving somebody a reason to pay for it.

The classroom gets a sponsor

The financing arrangement became central to Martinez’s work. Financial institutions and other organizations support education programs; schools gain access without having to buy the sponsored resources themselves. Everfi supplies the digital curriculum and the infrastructure around implementation. Private money pays for a public-facing lesson, with each participant needing a clear reason to stay involved.

Martinez helped develop relationships with institutions including MassMutual, PenFed, TD Bank, Santander and Truist. The subjects are recognizably ordinary: saving, credit, entrepreneurship, investing. Their ordinariness is part of the point. A person does not need to be planning a finance career to need a working understanding of a bank account.

For sponsors, the arrangement can build connections with the communities they serve. For teachers, usefulness depends on whether the material works in a school day. Those interests meet at the product. A curriculum cannot live indefinitely on a partnership announcement, however handsome the logos may look together.

This attention to usefulness also appears in Everfi’s adult education. In 2024, Martinez described an overhaul of Achieve around customer feedback, personal relevance, goals and action planning. His emphasis was on giving learners a reason to return and something to do with what they learned. The same question follows a course from middle school to adulthood: what happens after the screen closes?

Five million is also one family at a time

The MassMutual Foundation partnership offers a view of that work over time. FutureSmart launched in 2015 for middle school students. By August 2024, the partners were marking five million students reached across all 50 states, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico. A program built around early money decisions had become a sustained relationship between an education company and a foundation.

Martinez’s reflections on the milestone returned to conversations with students. Young people told him they had taken lessons home, discussing credit cards, paying for college or a sibling’s finances. The classroom’s boundary was proving porous in a useful direction. Information could travel home in the same bag as homework.

He also acknowledged the limits of financial education on its own. His argument linked lessons with access to financial services and opportunities to apply them. That is a sensible restraint for someone in the business of teaching: a person can understand a savings account and still need money to put in it. The course is one part of the circumstances surrounding a decision.

Puerto Rico is family business

For Martinez, Puerto Rico gives the work an explicitly personal geography. His father was born there. In January 2018, as the island was recovering from Hurricane Maria, he helped announce an agreement making Everfi’s digital financial curriculum available to public elementary and high schools. The initial implementation target was at least 25 schools, with expansion to follow.

The subjects included credit, saving and budgeting. Martinez tied the commitment to his family connection to the island. Here was a place where the company’s broader argument about opportunity intersected with a responsibility he described in personal terms. Technology and skills were part of helping students prepare for the economy beyond their school gates.

By April 2026, the PenFed partnership had brought its curriculum to more than 5,000 students in 46 Puerto Rican schools over seven years. Its sixth island event took place in Humacao, at the Anita Otero Hernandez Specialized School of Fine Arts. More than 50 twelfth-graders had completed Tu Dinero, Tu Sueño, or Your Money, Your Dreams.

The gathering added people to the digital lessons. Students asked PenFed leaders and volunteers questions in small groups, and two students received scholarships of $1,250 each. Martinez attended and later reflected on the encounter. For a founder concerned with what education makes possible, there is an obvious appeal in being close enough to hear the questions.

The example he remembers wore no executive title

When Martinez has talked about leadership, he has reached further back than his own management career. His grandfather, who had an eighth-grade education, worked as a street sweeper. Martinez remembered the example of that work and connected it with the importance of recognizing effort throughout an organization.

“Leading by example is really important,” he said in a 2018 interview. The observation was accompanied by a specific instruction: recognize people beyond the sales leaders and executives. Coming from someone whose business depends on relationships, it is a revealing choice of example. The work worth noticing can happen a long way from the meeting room.

His responsibilities have extended into governance. He joined the PROG Holdings board in 2021 and has served on the national board of the Jump$tart Coalition for Personal Financial Literacy. His work has also involved financial literacy discussions with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and state attorneys general. The network around a school lesson reaches into regulation, corporate decisions and public policy.

“I quickly learned about budgeting and credit card debt the hard way.”Ray Martinez · 2010

Still asking what happens after the lesson

Everfi’s corporate circumstances have changed around that continuing work. Blackbaud acquired the company in late 2021 and sold the business on December 31, 2024. Martinez now leads it as CEO. The history deserves its dates: the company familiar to readers as an Everfi business under Blackbaud has entered a subsequent chapter.

In August 2025, Everfi announced that New York City Public Schools had selected its program as one of two vetted high school financial education resources. That September, a refreshed brand put renewed emphasis on financial education and relationships between businesses and communities. The underlying proposition remained recognizable from the early years: make useful learning available through partners willing to support it.

The question of trust became more explicit in 2026. An Everfi survey released in August found that 79 percent of participating parents would trust a financial institution more if it provided financial education. The March survey involved 750 U.S. parents and carried an approximate four-point margin of error. Martinez’s response connected educational support with how families judge an institution’s commitment.

It is an argument he can make from several directions: as an operator, a founder, a first-generation graduate and a son whose family began in Puerto Rico. The recurring subject is preparation. A student facing a college application, a teenager asking about credit and an adult setting a financial goal all benefit from having someone explain the terms before the decision arrives.

Martinez’s own account supplies a modest ending to a story of institutional reach. He was supported, worked hard, graduated, and still had things to learn about money. His company has spent years trying to move some of those lessons earlier. Life will continue to set examinations without notice. He would like the students to have seen a few of the questions.