Turning 18 is a milestone for many American teenagers, often punctuated by decisions they could not legally make as minors: vote in an election, get married, or get a tattoo.

But Casey Carkhuff celebrated his birthday last year differently.

“As soon as I turned 18, I opened up a SoFi account,” said Carkhuff, a college sophomore studying finance at Bowling Green State University in Ohio and a SoFi member. “It was the first thing I did and I love it everyday.”

Carkhuff grew up in a small town north of Cleveland with a graduating high school class of just 80 students. He said personal finance was not a major part of his early education or big discussion topic at home, and so he took it upon himself to learn.

“I started looking at investments and stocks when I was in the seventh or eighth grade,” Carkhuff said. “It’s a big thing for my generation, making sure you’re thinking about your financial future. You can open a brokerage account on your phone. It’s so easy.”

Now Carkhuff checks the stock market every day. He said he follows the news and talks about companies he is watching with friends in what he called an informal investment club – usually just a few college kids sitting around, watching TV, and chatting about what is happening in the world.

He has also leaned into personalized financial education, something banks and technology companies have talked about for decades but have often struggled to deliver at scale.

The challenge is not a lack of information. There has never been more financial information available, but trusting it – and applying it to one’s own life – can be difficult.

SoFi’s answer is Coach, an AI-powered chat tool built in collaboration with OpenAI. Coach draws on all of a member’s SoFi accounts, such as banking, credit, investing, savings, and externally connected accounts, to provide guidance tailored to that person’s circumstances. And Carkhuff is one of more than 200,000 members who had a conversation with Coach in a recent 30-day period, according to a company analysis.

Lauren Anastasio, a CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER^® at SoFi, is part of the team that built and trains Coach. When she speaks directly with SoFi members, many are anxious that their financial questions aren’t sophisticated enough, or that they don’t have enough money to be worth the time.

This may be because for decades, many financial advisors were paid based on the assets they managed, Anastasio said. Even though SoFi has steered away from many minimums and high advisory fees, people remember that many in the industry required large deposits to get started.

“There’s been an assumption that you need to have a certain amount of assets to receive good guidance,” she said. “That’s simply not true.”

Of course, opening doors means creating guardrails too.

Coach is designed to avoid certain responses: It won’t tell a member to buy a particular stock or fund, or recommend draining a checking or savings account to eliminate debt. The goal, Anastasio said, is that Coach come as close as possible to the guidance a member would receive from a SoFi credentialed financial planner.

That said, it isn’t a substitute for financial guidance. Members need to know its responses are only as complete as the information they provide.

In fact, part of the draw is that Coach is available when a planner may not be, Anastasio said. Members can ask a question in the middle of the evening, or explore a topic before they know exactly what to ask.

“If you have never engaged with a financial planner before, you know it can be very intimate … very intimidating,” Anastasio said. “That goes away when you’re having a text-based conversation in the app. There’s a lot less pressure.”

Brandon Cote, a 28-year-old IT specialist in Massachusetts and a SoFi member, has used Coach to do things like set up a monthly budget and research first-time homebuyer programs. Because he had already connected some of his accounts to SoFi’s dashboard, Coach had access to information from across his financial life.

“If I wanted to do it with, like, another [chat] tool, I’d have to import statements and do it manually,” he said. “This is much easier… and it knows what’s going on with me.”

For Emily Chin, a 38-year-old clinical manager at Sutter Home Health in San Francisco, the questions are different – and the time horizon is longer. Because her grandmother lived past 100-years-old, Chin is even more focused on investing over the long-term.

“I want to go on nice vacations, but I also don’t want to be an adult that can’t afford vacations when I retire,” she said.

Chin earns a good income but still cannot afford a home where she lives. Coach, she said, can give her a place to “spitball” questions without “having to read every financial article or listen to every podcast.”

Chin’s experience with Coach has been a bit more tentative. She tested Coach during its beta period and said she wanted more ways to model hypothetical outcomes and more practical alerts, such as a warning that an account might overdraft.

“It needs to have bumpers,” Chin said. “As more features become available, I could reconsider my options.”

The first version of Coach centered largely on chat-based financial guidance. But now Coach can remember goals and household details (if the member chooses to share) and there are more features planned for the future.

Coach is able to “codeswitch” thanks, in part, to the team of financial planners at SoFi that are constantly reviewing Coach’s responses and rating conversations, Anastasio said. From a first paycheck to a first home and, eventually, a retirement that could last decades, the questions change with each stage of life.

“Every morning, my team logs in and they have assignments of actual member conversations that took place the night before,” she said. “It’s all anonymized, but you can see what members asked and what the output was… They evaluate those outputs based on how accurate and helpful they are.”

The tool has been made possible in part by a collaboration with OpenAI.

“Personalized financial guidance can be hard to come by,” said Nikunj Handa, head of product for the OpenAI API, whose team worked with SoFi to build Coach. “People may ask their friends, who may or may not have good guidance… a big focus for OpenAI has been around distributing the benefits of AI as broadly as possible. So it is very mission-aligned for us to bring the intelligence of our models into the experiences SoFi is building.”

Handa said that is why he and his team love to work on projects such as Coach.

SoFi has also been rigorous in making sure that the right context is entering the model, Handa said. “It won’t do as well without the right context.”

For Carkhuff, the Bowling Green college sophomore, Coach is already part of a much simpler routine.

He is paying for part of his college education. He is building an emergency fund, contributing to retirement, and learning how to invest. When a paycheck of about $1,000 comes in from his full-time summer sales job, Coach helps him divide it among food, school, savings, and his Roth IRA.

“It breaks it up for me,” he said. “And it’s all right there in the app… I don’t have to go anywhere else.”

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