The reason this matters is that much of the criticism of at the time of Northwestern Mutual's acquisition was solely focused on the LearnVest's financial planning business, with commentators asking how a business could be worth 50 to 100 times their revenue while not growing all that much.
#Learnvest free budgeting software software#
To better understand what was really going on in the LearnVest deal, it’s important to recognize that there were really three separate assets associated with LearnVest, all under one umbrella. The first was the LearnVest financial planning business, which at the time had about 10,000 “premium” clients paying $19/month for financial planning advice, as well as another 25,000 clients who were workers enrolled in the financial wellness program that they had just launched. The second asset of LearnVest was their content platform, targeted primarily at women and younger investors, that had hundreds of thousands of unique monthly visitors, and was supported by the media exposure of their CEO Alexa Von Tobel herself. The third asset of LearnVest was their Personal Financial Management portal, and the financial planning software they built on the back end, which at the time of acquisition reportedly had a whopping 1.5 million registered users (i.e., retail consumers). In this week’s #OfficeHours with my Tuesday 1PM EST broadcast via Periscope, we discuss why Northwestern Mutual's decision to shut down the LearnVest planning business is not a sign of failure, why the acquisition was likely never about Alexa Von Tobel's "$19 per month financial planning service" in the first place, and where the real value of LearnVest was for Northwestern Mutual instead. However, the truth is that Northwestern Mutual acquisition of LearnVest was likely never about the LearnVest business model in the first place, and that by integrating LearnVest technology into Northwestern Mutual, the acquisition not only hasn't been a failure, and in fact may still be just getting started!
In the two weeks since Northwestern Mutual announced that it was "shutting down" its 2015 acquisition of the LearnVest financial planning business and relaunching the LearnVest brand as an education-only content platform later this year, the industry has been immersed in “post-mortem autopsy” analyses of what happened and how Northwestern Mutual got to the point that they’re closing a business line that they bought just 3 years ago for a whopping $250 million dollars.
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