Gild started with a conversation and a spreadsheet that changed how a friend thought about his own life. Here is the story of why we built it.
One of our founders is a sociable person. He talks to his friends about everything: career moves, property, plans for the future. A few years ago he started noticing something that surprised him. His friends were intelligent people, often in senior positions, earning good money. But when the conversation turned to finances, a pattern emerged.
Very few of them had a clear picture of where their money was or what they could do with it. Most had their savings sitting in cash or fixed deposits. A handful had gone the other direction entirely and put everything into crypto. Very few of them knew what ISAs they could use, how pensions worked in their favour, or what the UK tax system actually allowed them to do.
For friends who had come from other countries, it was even harder. The UK tax system is already complicated. Add another country's rules and most people simply give up and accept that they will never fully understand it.
"These were smart, successful people. The problem wasn't ability. Nobody had ever shown them the full picture."
The knowledge gap was not about intelligence but access. Proper financial planning had always been something you either paid a lot for, or figured out yourself through hours of research and guesswork. Most people did neither. They just got on with things and hoped it would work out.
One evening, our founder sat down with a close friend to talk about retirement. The friend had reasonable assets: money spread across accounts, a pension he had not thought about in years, properties abroad. But he had never pulled it all together. He had no idea what his actual financial position looked like.
They built a cashflow spreadsheet together. Nothing sophisticated. Just a picture of what he owned, what he owed, and what it all meant year by year going forward.
"He spent every evening for weeks refining that spreadsheet. He called me almost every day, excited, like he had found something magical. But it was always his money. He just never had a clear view of it."
Founder, GetGildA grown adult, financially comfortable, had never seen his own financial position laid out clearly. Once he could see it, the anxiety lifted. He wasn't in a worse position than he thought. He just finally knew what his position was.
That spreadsheet should not have been a revelation. It should have been something everyone can access, easily, without needing a technical friend to build it for them.
Our other founder has spent his career building technology for banks and financial institutions. He has seen how the industry works from the inside: the infrastructure, the data, the APIs, the possibilities.
What surprised him was the gap between what the technology could do and what ordinary people actually had access to. He had watched Open Banking develop and mature in the UK. He had seen the tools that institutions use internally to understand financial data. And yet most people were still logging into five or six different apps to piece together a rough picture of their own finances, or worse, maintaining a spreadsheet they updated once a year.
The technology to solve this had existed since at least 2018, when Open Banking launched in the UK. The problem was that nobody had made it useful and accessible to the person who just wants to know where they stand.
"The hardest part wasn't the technology. The hardest part was asking: why hasn't someone done this already? And then realising that the answer was: they should. And we should be the ones to do it."
Founder, GetGildMost financial anxiety comes from not knowing, not from the numbers themselves. Show someone where they actually stand and the stress usually drops immediately.
Good financial planning is not complicated. It is hard to see when your money is in six different places. Put it in one place and most people can figure out the rest themselves.
Some people grew up talking about ISAs at the dinner table. Most didn't. Gild gives everyone the same starting point regardless of background.
We connect to your accounts to show you your money. We never move it, sell your data, or use it to sell you things. We are a tool, not a data business.
Open Banking launched in the UK in 2018. Pension dashboards are live. The building blocks have been there for years. We just built the thing that ties them together.
You do not need to predict the future. You just need to know what today looks like, what your goal is, and roughly how far apart they are. Gild keeps that picture current.
The cashflow planning conversation that sparked Gild was his. He had watched smart, senior people make financial decisions in the dark for years and couldn't accept that nothing existed to fix it. He leads product and growth: what Gild does and who it reaches.
A decade building technology inside banks and financial institutions. He had seen the data, the APIs, the infrastructure, and the frustration of watching none of it reach ordinary people. He leads engineering and cares about one thing above everything else: that it actually works.