A decade in church finance. One obvious gap.
In 2015, I co-founded Finch, an accounting and finance firm built to bring premium financial expertise to businesses, nonprofits, and churches at an economical price. Over the years, Finch grew into a team of 50+ serving hundreds of organizations across the country — with churches making up a significant part of our client base.
Working that closely with church finances, I started to see a clear pattern in the retirement space. Large denominations have purpose-built programs, but for churches that wanted their own solution, or existed outside of those denominations, the landscape looks very different. The available options tend to be more expensive, less tailored, and harder to manage.
In 2018, I registered Shorebird as a Registered Investment Advisor. It started with financial advising and investment management for individual clients. But the more church work I did through Finch, the clearer it became that what was really missing was at the institutional level: a way for churches to offer their people an affordable, modern retirement plan that was individually catered for them.
That's what Shorebird is today. It brings together everything we've learned — church accounting and payroll, investment management, financial planning, and our experience in building technology to tie it all together — into a single platform purpose-built for 403(b)(9) retirement plans.
