True Link Financial offers a debit card with spending controls expressly designed for people with dementia, other cognitive deficits or addiction issues. It also manages special needs trusts.
By Lindsey Choo, Forbes Staff
In November 2020, Alana Peralez received the sort of emergency call she’d been dreading. Her then 84-year-old dad, a retired aerospace engineer who’d lived alone in his Arizona house since her mom died in 2006, had suffered a stroke. After months of rehab in a nursing home and then a group home, he still had problems with mobility and completing complex tasks. So in April of 2021, they agreed he should move into an assisted living apartment complex near his old neighborhood and friends–a good housing option for someone who needs help with certain daily activities, such as cooking, or managing medicines, but values his independence and doesn’t need skilled nursing or constant supervision.
Peralez, a 42-year-old economic development specialist who lives with her husband and daughter in Los Angeles, was now managing her dad’s finances, as well as his care, from a distance. Even before his stroke, she’d worried he was starting to fall for scams and junk products pitched by telemarketers and door-to-door salesmen. Now she wanted something akin to assisted living for his spending.
“He needs more help but he still wants some control of his life. He’s an adult,’’ she says.
After some online research, her husband found the solution: a prepaid Visa debit card that allows a relative or other trusted administrator to monitor the cardholder’s transactions and set up dozens of individual spending controls limiting the size and nature of purchases and how and where they occur—for example, blocking certain charges from telemarketers or online. Attempted charges by known fraudsters are automatically blocked, while administrators can get alerts when unusual spending has been detected or transactions declined. Both the cardholder and the administrator have to consent to the arrangement, but the administrator doesn’t need to hold a financial power of attorney, since the card is funded with discrete deposits—not all of a holder’s assets.
The unique card is offered by True Link Financial, a 12-year-old San Francisco-based financial technology company, which this past week was named to the Forbes Fintech 50 list for 2025–on the strength of its mission and recent growth and profitability. After scrambling to survive in its earlier years, True Link has been in the black for the past two years, netting $2 million on $30 million in revenue in 2024, says CEO and cofounder Kai Stinchcombe.
Over the years, Khosla Ventures, QED Investors and Centana Growth Partners, among others, have poured $60 million into the startup. In its last fundraise, in January 2022, during the height of the fintech boom, True Link raised $12 million at a $144 million valuation. Since then, its revenue has doubled, Stinchcombe says, and it’s now able to fund growth internally. He and cofounder Claire McDonnell still own about 30 percent of the company, Forbes estimates.
The 100-employee operation reached this point with just two tightly related core products: It currently oversees more than 150,000 individual debit cards for users with cognitive disabilities and for those recovering from (or in the throes of) addiction. True Link charges a $12 a month fee for an individual stand-alone True Link Visa Prepaid Card, with the card bringing in about two thirds of its revenue.
The other third comes from True Link’s growing business as an SEC-registered investment advisor, managing nearly $1.5 billion in individual and pooled “special needs” trusts–these trusts are typically funded by families and designed to pay for extras for disabled individuals without jeopardizing their eligibility for Medicaid or certain other government benefits, such as Supplemental Security Income (SSI). True Link charges 1% of assets to manage trusts, which are held at Charles Schwab and allocated to low-cost ETFs. But what it’s really selling here is knowledge of what can and can’t be done with special needs trusts, plus a handy way to supervise and document how the money is spent through its debit cards.
A 56-year-old television writer based in Los Angeles, who asked not to be named, says he took over managing his sister’s special needs trust in 2019, after finding out that his father had been embezzling from it for gambling. “Because of what my dad did, I wanted to do everything the right way,” he says. A lawyer advised him to use True Link and its prepaid card. A set amount–which he decides with his sister, who suffers from aphasia– is transferred to her debit card weekly. An added advantage: The consistency and structure has led her to become more financially responsible, he says.
Stinchcombe, 42, is the son of two professors, both prominent sociologists. He double majored in history and computer science, but dropped out of a Ph.D. program in political science at Stanford to organize and run a network of progressive policy campus organizations. He then got involved in two other for-profit startups (a sales management platform and a redistricting analytics software company), before his grandmother’s Alzheimer’s set him on his current path.
As a retired church school teacher living on a small pension, she’d long made lots of tiny donations, giving $10 each to three or four causes she supported each month. But now, with her short term memory gone, she became vulnerable to unethical charitable solicitors, sometimes getting calls from, and donating via credit card, to the same charity multiple times a day. She started to fall for other pitches, too—for example, spending $6,000 on a wildly overpriced hearing aid after receiving a mailing offering a free hearing checkup at the mall, Stinchcombe says.
When Stinchcombe called his grandmother’s bank for help, he ran into what he says is still a standard bank response. “Either she’s mentally competent, in which case she’s responsible for the transactions she authorizes, or she’s not mentally competent, in which case she can’t authorize a transaction and we have to close the account.”
So he went looking for a niche card issuer which would meet his family’s needs and found there simply wasn’t one. ”I couldn’t shake the idea that this was a solution that should exist,’’ he says. He began discussing the problem–and the potential opportunity–with McDonnell, a San Francisco friend who also had a grandmother with dementia, as well as a background in nonprofit consulting and experience building a wellness app. They were part of Y Combinator’s summer of 2013 incubator class and launched the card later that year. “Our first year target was 50 customers and we missed it,’’ says Stinchcombe.
While many of the VCs they pitched were skeptical the idea could ever be profitable, the duo did attract some big name supporters (though not huge dollars) early on. For example, current Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan, along with Alexis Ohanian, his then partner in Initialized Capital Management, invested in a $5 million seed round in 2015.
Without bundles of cash for a consumer marketing push, Stinchcombe and McDonnell spread the word through social media, geriatric care managers and senior housing providers. In 2016, after a planned funding round fell through, Stinchcombe figured they’d be out of business in six months unless they learned to live within their means. Among other things, they put off the design of a better-looking website in favor of keeping their clunky but functional one. By 2017, the company had a positive cash flow from its debit card.
That’s when QED cofounder Frank Rotman, who now sits on True Link’s board, led an $8 million round. He wasn’t particularly focused, he says, on whether it had a big potential market. “If you’re an early stage investor, what you’re looking for is a problem statement for which the company can be the solution,’’ he explains.
There is certainly a problem–and a big one. Financial fraud against the elderly has been exploding. About seven million Americans are living with Alzheimer’s, the most common cause of dementia, and barring some medical breakthrough, that number will grow as Baby Boomers age. But there’s an even bigger potential market–those who have started to show signs of cognitive decline, even if they haven’t gotten (and may never get) a formal diagnosis.
In fact, financial losses are often the first sign there’s a problem, experts say. A 2023 retrospective study found that in the eight years prior to a dementia diagnosis, the median wealth in the predementia group dropped to less than half that of control households: $104,000, compared to $217,000. Both lower pre-diagnosis income and reduced financial judgement contribute to this decline, researchers concluded at a conference sponsored last year by the MIT AgeLab and AARP.
Truth is, it’s a fraught issue and solutions aren’t so obvious or readily accepted by elders. “Our customers are sort of, correctly, not early adopters,’’ Stinchcombe dryly observes.
True Link’s founders themselves repeatedly adjusted course before arriving at their card’s current configuration. Early on, they switched from a credit card model to a pre-funded debit card. Why? “We didn’t want to decline anyone who had bad credit and we didn’t want to make money on interest because somebody forgot to pay their credit card bill,’’ Stinchcombe explains. (As a fintech, True Link relies on St, Paul, Minn.-based Sunrise Banks to actually issue the Visa cards.)
Perhaps the most intriguing change: With a background of working with machine learning models, Stinchcomb at first believed the key to allowing the right spending would rest on building advanced algorithms. “The thing that we learned is that basically the problems are pretty easy to spot. It’s not this sort of advanced magical thing. It’s like, hey, limit (charitable) contributions to 50 bucks a month. You don’t need AI for that,’’ he says. “What you want is predictability. So let’s say your son is a recovering addict. You’re in a sober situation, you’re supposed to come right home after work. So any transaction after 5 P.M. should not be going on. And no cash, no bars or liquor stores.” An algorithm, with its mysterious workings, is less understandable, predictable and appealing to families than rules they can set and fine tune themselves.
Early on, McDonnell, who served as president of True Link until October of 2023, handled customer service requests herself. That helped the two founders build understanding of the sorts of dilemmas families faced and what spending controls they might need. “Every individual is unique, but we probably have seen the same issue enough times to say (to families), `Here’s what you want to click,’’ says Stinchcombe. “Once you have Alzheimer’s you might end up with a hundred magazine subscriptions–that’s something we saw in a client. Or you might lose track of how many dietary supplements you’re buying on TV, or you might see a great deal for one garden gnome and end up with 200 garden gnomes…We have a client who was loaning a hundred dollars every day to his housekeeper, which is a totally reasonable thing to do, but not something you should do every day.”
In 2018, the company introduced its investment arm, True Link Financial Advisors. There was a learning curve in that business, too. In 2022, without admitting liability, True Link agreed to pay $200,000 and Stinchcombe $20,000 in civil money penalties to settle a Securities & Exchange Commission finding that they caused violations of the antifraud provisions of the federal securities laws. The case stemmed from True Link’s management of certain pooled special needs trusts for Synergy Settlement Services. The SEC alleged Synergy led individuals with disabilities into believing that their funds were being managed by a nonprofit, when they weren’t–a violation of federal rules for Medicaid and SSI benefits. True Link had deferred to Synergy on how agreements were structured and shouldn’t have, Stinchcombe tells Forbes. “It’s not a way that we would defer now,” he said. “Now we would be a little more inflexible… we feel like we have the expertise where we can say the right way to do this is our way.” (Synergy itself denied wrongdoing, but was recently ordered by a Federal judge in the Middle District of Florida to pay $400,000 in civil penalties and $44,000 for net profits gained as a result of the alleged conduct.)
In July 2020, True Link completed its biggest fundraising round–a $35 million Series B at a $110 million valuation. “We spent our whole Series B on scaling up growth that didn’t work,” admits Stinchcombe, adding that the company hired too many salespeople in what turned out to be a mistaken belief that they would goose growth. “I wish we had spent the money slower and more carefully, and had been more patient to let customers find us at their own pace, rather than working so hard to chase them.”
As for future plans, Stinchcombe’s so far unrealized ambition is to sell the debit card as a white label product to banks–a solution the banks could offer to families distraught about grandma’s out of control charitable charges or garden gnome purchases.
“I don’t want to invite everybody to compete with us,’’ Stinchcombe says. “But ultimately, I think if the financial world understood how big a problem this is, there would be a lot more attention to this type of service.”
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