The Announcement
Introducing Sabal (say-bul) Finance, a financial caregiving platform designed for families!
Currently, we’re internally testing the application and are close to making it generally available. In the meantime, we are actively looking for families to interview about caregiving challenges and are offering participants three months of Sabal free!
The Product
To start, we focused on making it easy to collectively review financial accounts. When you sign up for Sabal, a collaborative workspace is created to hold your accounts. You can invite trusted people to that workspace, each with their own sign in credentials and access permissions. This could be another family member, an attorney, or a financial planner. We’ve partnered with Plaid to securely connect bank accounts, credit cards, investments accounts, and mortgages to your workspace. These connections provide your care team with a unified view of account activity over time. With your accounts connected, you can use our Financial Review workflow to examine balance changes and large transactions on a schedule you set. Everyone with access to workflows in your workspace receives an email when it’s time for the review, keeping everyone on the same page.
The Backstory
I’m Allen, the founder of Sabal. Growing up, my family shared the responsibility of caring for my grandfather, whom I’m named after. Now, I see the challenges they faced presented again to my family and friends. I work in financial technologies and a family member works in adult protective services, so my discussions with caregivers are mostly about financial tasks: monitoring accounts, keeping track of passwords, paying the bills, etc. I created Sabal to support common financial caregiving scenarios like those, giving families more time and energy to spend with each other.
Announcing Sabal on May 15 is fitting: it’s National Senior Fraud Awareness Day. The most-recent FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) Elder Fraud Report shows an 11% increase in fraud since that bill was drafted in 2022, with a total loss in 2023 of $3.4 billion and average loss of $33,195. These numbers are staggering. However, watching out for financial fraud is only one component of providing financial care.
I spoke with several families to learn about their approach to financial caregiving. While every family is different, two thing consistently came up: the drive to come together as a family to provide support and the need to manage fragmented financial accounts. These stories helped shape the initial version of Sabal.
We’re just getting started and are excited to hear what you’d like added to the product! Feel free to email me at allen@sabal.finance or set up an interview to share ideas and suggestions.
I look forward to earning your business.
— Allen Sanford, Founder