Aura offers a comprehensive suite of services designed to enhance financial well-being and support employees every step of the way.Aura Finance
A woman sits across from a financial coach and cannot stop apologizing. She hasn’t saved enough. She hasn’t paid down enough debt. She hasn’t done the things she thinks she should have. This isn’t a special case. It’s the default emotional state of most working adults right now, and it’s the exact scene Courtney Cardin and Kelsey Willock built a company to interrupt.
That scene plays out constantly inside Aura Finance, the company Cardin and Willock built around a stubborn premise: people don’t manage money badly because they lack information. They manage it badly because nobody ever taught them what to do with the fear. Aura shows up as a benefit inside the workplace, coaching and tools offered alongside things like therapy and fertility support, on the theory that a person’s relationship with money deserves the same kind of care as their physical or mental health. Cardin describes it more bluntly than any pitch deck would allow. It’s “a couples therapist for you and your money.”
Five years in, the timing has caught up with the thesis in a way neither founder expected when they started. Wages have barely moved in thirty years. Electricity bills in some cities have hit $800 a month for small apartments, a cost now tied to the power draw of AI data centers. And the AI boom that’s minting new wealth at some companies is, within the same news cycle, making the people who hold that wealth wonder if they’ll have a job in five years. “Never before have we had people who work at one company have such a windfall,” Cardin said, “and within weeks then feel economically insecure and uncertain about the future that they have.”
Courtney Cardin, Co-Founder of Aura FinanceAura Finance
A Problem They Lived First
Willock’s version of the problem started at Goldman Sachs, where she landed her dream job straight out of college and assumed it would fix everything. “I thought it was the best place in the world to learn about money,” she said. “That just turned out not to be the case.” She was drowning in student debt and too embarrassed to say so out loud, until a manager named Amy started coaching her through it, refinancing eleven loans and, more importantly, teaching her to stop treating money as a source of shame. Willock later invited Amy to invest in Aura.
Cardin’s route was longer and less direct: law school, a Senate staff job, a stretch representing Fortune 500 clients. She’d been carrying a vague idea about financial literacy since a trip to Australia years earlier, unsure it was hers to build. It became real at a hackathon, when she said it out loud for the first time and a room of strangers took it seriously. Meeting Willock made it inevitable. “Who is this magical unicorn who’s got all of these things that are my big gaps,” Cardin remembered thinking.
Neither of them set out to build the same company. They built two versions of the same answer and merged them.
Redefining Who Needs Help
The obvious assumption is that Aura serves people in poverty. It doesn’t, and the founders push back hard on the idea that it should. “You’re more likely to go bankrupt if you win the lottery than if you don’t,” Willock said, a statistic she reaches for often to make the point that financial distress isn’t really about the number in the account.
The actual customer is someone earning a decent, unremarkable salary who has never opened a budgeting app and feels quietly bad about it. Too solvent for payday lending, not wealthy enough to justify a financial advisor’s time. Willock calls money “the leading cause of stress and anxiety for the workforce” right now, which is part of why Aura’s client roster includes Pinterest, LinkedIn, and a telecom company with 20,000 employees rather than individual retail customers.
Kelsey Willock, Co-Founder of Aura Finance Aura Finance
Confidence As The Real Metric
Aura’s early work with Headspace set the template for how the company defines success, and it’s not the metric most financial products chase. Not new savings accounts opened. Not debt paid down. Confidence and stress, instead, tracked over time. The choice leaned on research out of Georgetown and Cornell showing that mindset is the single factor most within a person’s control in shaping their financial trajectory.
The gap Aura is trying to close is bigger than most companies realize. Ninety-two percent of employers believe they provide sufficient financial support, Willock said. Twelve percent of employees agree. Nobody talks about it in the way people now talk about mental health or fertility struggles, because financial shame still doesn’t have permission to be spoken about at work.
One client Willock remembers clearly came into the program certain she was behind. She left having made no dramatic income change. What shifted was that she stopped believing she was failing. “She realized she was far better off than she thought she was,” Willock said.
The Limits Of Mindset
Cardin is careful not to let the mindset framing curdle into something glib. “You cannot meditate your way out of poverty,” she said. “That’s a real problem. The growing wealth gap is a real problem.” Aura isn’t arguing that better feelings fix broken systems. Its bet is narrower: that for people who do have some resources, the block is often not knowledge but the willingness to act on it, and that willingness is exactly what nobody’s been building for.
What Comes Next
Health insurers, not just employers, are now approaching Aura on their own, asking for the same behavioral work the company already runs inside corporate benefits. Cardin doesn’t pretend the next decade will be calm. “The people who are going to win are the people who invest in themselves and figure out how to maximize the resources they have within their control, starting with their mindset,” she said. What started as two women quietly fixing their own relationship with money is turning into a bet that most of the workforce needs the same fix, whether they know it yet or not.
This article was originally published on Forbes.com
