Interview With Maji Co-Founder, Sahil Sethi

@mirilagrasta

Maji is a financial wellbeing platform that helps employees of all ages achieve financial capability, resilience and freedom by understanding and making the most of their pensions and preparing them for the future. A modern pension-focused coaching service, Maji is available to users via employers and it aims to help people meet their retirement saving ambitions.

Launched in 2019, the platform uses AI and behavioural science to track a person’s pension pots, educate people, tell them how much they need to save for retirement and help them to get there. We caught up with Maji co-founder Sahil Sethi to learn more about the startup.

What Is Maji?

We are a digital coach that increases customers’ financial wellbeing by helping them take control of their financial life. That’s our end goal. But to accomplish it we will start working with pensions first, and educate people about them. We think that everyone should have a retirement plan, because there’s a 90% chance that they will reach retirement.. In the UK only, around 20 million people are under-saving for retirement. And that’s half the adult population of the entire country. I had been working in the pensions’ industry for 15 years when I came up with the idea for Maji: I realised people were not saving enough for their retirement, and not because they didn’t want to, but because they didn’t know how pensions worked. 

What Values Does Your Brand Signify?

Trust and respect. Trust because you are working with an individual’s financial data, you are telling them to do certain things or guiding them through certain steps, and in order for you to do that they should be able to trust you with their data, but also trust you, as a coach, with the fact that you are going to make the best possible decision about their financial future for them, in their interest. The other value is respect, because I think finance is a tough and complicated subject, and everyone’s financial situation is different. There’s a lot of financial vulnerability out there. When you’re helping people solve their financial issues you need to be respectful of their situation and not impose your ideas and beliefs. You need to work within boundaries to help them get the right outcome in their financial life. Respect should be right up there. We don’t know everything in this world, so we should be open to the opinions and experiences that others bring to the table. 

How Did You Bring Those Values Into The Brand?

My son was born just when I came up with the idea for Maji, and I realised that the bond that he had with my wife was quite unique and special. That’s a type of human bond that goes across all cultures. That mother-child bond is based on trust. Once they’re born, the one person that babies trust with their life is their mother. The mother will take care of them. To me, there was no bigger word that signified trust at the most basic level than mother. “Ma” is a very common word across the world to signify “mother”. I took that word into the brand’s name to represent the value “trust”. While “ji” is a word that we use in India to signify “respect” right after a name. “Ma” and “ji” are our core values. When I put these two words together I had “Maji”. To me, having our two core values inside our name meant that when we’re talking to a customer, when the customer comes to Maji, or when there’s a team member coming on board, they will know straight away that we value trust and respect first and foremost.