Mae Watson Grote

• Advise the leadership of an AI-native personal-finance company on impact strategy, partnership development, and outcome measurement, embedding accountability for consumer financial well-being into product and partnership design.

• Lead research at the intersection of fintech, consumer behavior, and policy, translating market and regulatory shifts into insight on how households actually experience financial products.
• Build frameworks for measuring consumer financial health and product-level value, and produce applied analysis of emerging products such as earned wage access (EWA) and buy-now-pay-later (BNPL).

• Built a financial-health technology company — from a legal-services practice for working families into national product infrastructure used by 13,000+ practitioners across all 50 states and roughly 4,000 partner organizations, returning $83M in measurable financial value to clients.
• Created Financial-Coaching-as-a-Service (FCaaS), a B2B SaaS business with a $750K ARR recurring-revenue line and $50M+ in cumulative capitalization across grants, contracts, and subscriptions.
• Shipped an ML recommendation engine, built with IBM's Data Science & AI Elite Team under Trusted-AI principles, moving product adoption from 60% to 98%; designed the data architecture, ETL, and outcome framework behind it.
• Established a financial-health outcome framework validated in a CFPB-commissioned randomized controlled trial showing significant gains in savings, debt, and credit.
• Led the acquisition of Change Machine by Prosperity Now, overseeing due diligence on data security, compliance, and AI governance alignment.
• Led the vision for the Refund529 policy campaign, which lets New York families save for college directly from their state tax refund — an estimated $6.5M saved across 280,000+ filers in its first three years.

Earlier

• Program Director, Labor Market Initiatives — Public/Private Ventures
• Project Coordinator — FoodChange
• Welfare-Benefits Advocate & Paralegal — The Legal Aid Society