retirement
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Beth Wood Wants Money to Feel Human
The chief marketing officer of Principal Financial Group built a career on a stubborn idea - that an industry running on spreadsheets and fine print can still make people feel understood.
Greg Boosin
After nearly two decades learning every side of Mastercard, Greg Boosin moved to Equitable with a practical thesis: complicated financial products still have to make sense to actual people.
Abdul Al-Asaad
He grew up in a refugee camp and learned finance at Goldman Sachs. Now Abdul Al-Asaad wants to hand ordinary savers the borrowing power that has always belonged to the wealthy.
Aaron Schumm
He built the plumbing behind America's savings accounts - the 401(k)s, 529s and state programs most people never think about - by betting that the boring middle of finance was the biggest opportunity nobody wanted.
Jean Smart
Jean Smart is the founder and CEO of Penelope, a New York fintech rebuilding the retirement recordkeeping layer for the small and micro-businesses Wall Street forgot. After a 20-plus year career as a financial-services executive at Charles Schwab, TD Ameritrade, Citigroup and UBS, she left a managing-director seat to build affordable, fully-digital 401(k) infrastructure for solopreneurs and mom-and-pop shops. The company, which she named after her daughter, launched in 2022 with a mission to put generational wealth-building within reach of the workers institutions have historically overlooked.
Cobi Blumenfeld-Gantz
Cobi Blumenfeld-Gantz is the CEO and co-founder of Chapter, an AI-powered Medicare navigation platform he started in 2020 after watching his own parents struggle to enroll. Built with co-founder Vivek Ramaswamy and early backing from J.D. Vance, Chapter crossed $100 million in annual recurring revenue and raised a $100 million Series E in April 2026 at a roughly $3 billion valuation. A former Palantir government-team lead with degrees from Wharton and Cambridge, he calls himself one of the most hated people in the Medicare brokerage business precisely because Chapter's advisors are paid to recommend the best plan rather than the most lucrative one.
Kevin Nazemi
Kevin Nazemi is the co-founder and CEO of Charlie, a Los Angeles fintech building banking specifically for Americans aged 62 and older. After co-founding the health insurance disruptor Oscar Health and later the retiree health platform Renew Health, he turned to a market almost everyone in fintech ignored: seniors collecting Social Security. Charlie launched nationwide in May 2023 with faster access to Social Security checks, no monthly fees, competitive yields, and fraud safeguards built for a generation that loses an estimated $36 billion a year to financial scams.
Carlos Garcia
Carlos Garcia is the founder and CEO of Finhabits, a bilingual money app built to close the wealth gap for U.S. Latinos. An MIT-trained engineer who spent nearly two decades on Wall Street, he turned the realization that he once had no idea what a 401(k) was into a platform that lets people start investing for as little as $5 a week. Finhabits has grown to more than 800,000 members and earned recognition from Goldman Sachs and Fast Company.
Jeff Schneble
Jeff Schneble is the CEO of Human Interest, a San Francisco-based fintech company on a mission to close America's $28 trillion retirement savings gap by making 401(k) and 403(b) plans affordable and accessible for small and medium-sized businesses. A physicist turned venture capitalist turned operator, Schneble brought together a rare trifecta of academic rigor (PhD from Cambridge, MBA from Harvard), investment experience (Partner at Wing Venture Capital), and hands-on operational chops (Silver Lake Partners) before taking the helm at Human Interest in 2019. Under his leadership, the company has grown to serve over 45,000 companies, surpassed $200 million in ARR, raised over $1 billion in total funding at a $3 billion valuation, and is eyeing a public listing.