What Happens When You Personalize? A 225% Boost in Microentrepreneur Engagement
SaverLife member Janelle owns her own business in Georgia
Challenge
Microentrepreneurs—including gig workers and 1099 earners pursuing side hustles, creative passions, or small businesses—often navigate a financial landscape defined by uncertainty. Many piece together multiple income streams without access to employer-provided benefits, paid leave, or stable wages. Among SaverLife’s 700,000 members, one-third identify as 1099 workers—an indicator of how prevalent this type of work has become among low- to moderate-income (LMI) households. These workers are more likely to experience income volatility and to rely on tax credits and public supports to make ends meet.
Despite significant investment in financial education—through courses, materials, and national campaigns—traditional one-size-fits-all approaches frequently fall short, especially for people navigating nontraditional work and fluctuating incomes. Research shows that 40% of LMI households still report they are “just getting by” or “finding it difficult to get by.” Financial stress can also limit the ability to plan, prioritize, and make informed decisions. These realities highlight the urgent need for more personalized, trustworthy, and responsive financial tools.
The emergence of generative AI offers a powerful opportunity to do things differently—to move beyond generic advice and toward personalized, adaptive support that helps people navigate complexity, build resilience, and achieve greater financial security. However, while the promise of AI is significant, its effectiveness for improving financial outcomes among low- to moderate-income households is still largely untested.
How might we move beyond one-size-fits-all solutions to create financial solutions that are personalized, inclusive, and actually work for people with unstable or nontraditional incomes? To explore this question, SaverLife set out to test whether tailored, data-informed support could meaningfully engage microentrepreneurs—and help them take tangible steps toward financial stability.
Project
With support from Mastercard Strive USA, SaverLife launched a pilot initiative focused specifically on microentrepreneurs to test how personalization could drive better financial outcomes. Through a prior project with Columbia University, SaverLife found that tailoring messages to personality types boosted engagement. We thought customizing content based on other member traits—like being a microentrepreneur—could have a similar effect.
SaverLife leveraged proprietary surveys, platform data, and behavioral indicators to identify 50,000 members who are likely microentrepreneurs or considering becoming one. These members—many of whom are driven to self-employment by necessity rather than choice—received a tailored SaverLife experience designed to meet their unique needs.
The customized experience included:
Timely, targeted communication through email and SMS ensured members received the right content when they needed it most.
Tailored content on the SaverLife platform, such as “Self-Employment Taxes: What You Need to Know”, that addressed timely and relevant financial challenges faced by our members.
A $10,000 savings challenge exclusively for microentrepreneurs, designed to reward positive engagement and in-platform financial behaviors, such as reading content or contributing to savings.
This work builds on SaverLife’s core approach: delivering the right information, to the right person, at the right time, in the right way—backed by real-time insights and member feedback.
Results
Personalization worked. Microentrepreneurs who received tailored messaging, content, and challenges engaged with the platform at significantly higher rates—proving that relevant, timely support drives real action. Through this pilot we saw:
A 225% increase in active platform engagement among targeted microentrepreneurs over the prior quarter
A 200% increase in digital content views, reflecting that relevant content is highly desirable to our ME members
Nearly 3,000 members opted into the exclusive savings challenge designed for microentrepreneurs
A 51% increase in participants actually saving during the savings challenge (from 57% of participants to 86%)
The bottom line: targeted personalization not only increases engagement but also improves savings behavior—demonstrating a clear link between tailored interventions and financial progress.
What’s Next
This level of success demonstrates that when you meet people where they are—with information that reflects their experiences and goals—they can make big gains. For SaverLife, these results validate an approach grounded in data, empathy, and behavioral design. They also offer valuable insights to inform the development of future tools to improve outcomes for low-income households.
SaverLife is now evolving toward an AI-enabled platform—expanding on our existing ability to deliver personalized content, partner referrals, peer engagement, and gamified savings tools to help members improve their financial health. By leveraging machine learning, SaverLife will generate real-time insights from member engagement, surveys, and transaction data to offer increasingly targeted experiences. SaverLife is also investing in generative AI to build a personalized financial navigator—a digital co-pilot designed to guide members to their next best financial action.
SaverLife’s future is rooted in a simple but powerful idea: when you meet people where they are, with what they truly need, you can help them take control of their financial lives and build a more stable, secure future.
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As we evolve our platform to deliver increasingly personalized and responsive support, we’re uncovering valuable insights from real-time member engagement, surveys, and transaction data.
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