Uncle Sam to Banks and Fintech: I Want YOU to Compete on Trump (or "530A") Accounts

Karen Biddle Andres, as the Director of Inclusive Saving and Investing at the Aspen Institute Financial Security Program, works to spark both policy and market changes that will enable everyone in America to successfully save and invest in assets that grow.

Jason Ewas is Associate Director of Early Wealth Building at the Aspen Institute Financial Security Program. 

On December 2, Michael and Susan Dell announced an historic $6.25 billion commitment to America’s kids, pledging to seed 25 million Trump Accounts, also called 530A Accounts, with $250 in 2026. In quick succession, Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick took to X to voice his support for a state proposal called the “New Little Texans Savings Fund,” which, if passed, would put another $1,000 into the 530A Accounts of the nearly 400,000 Texan babies born each year. On December 17, multiple companies announced their commitment to offer Trump Account contributions as an employee benefit.

These are incredible commitments to what is the largest early wealth building policy in American history. But what is the structure of the account poised to take these investments, exactly? Does it actually hold potential to build wealth for those who need it most? And what is the role of banks and fintechs in helping it reach its wealth-building potential?

A New Opportunity

In July 2025, Trump Accounts became the newest tax-advantaged account to help Americans save and invest for their future. Add it to the alphanumeric soup: 529s, IRAs, 401(k)s, 403(b)s, ABLEs, UGMAs, UTMAs, Ughhhhh.

But America has never had anything quite like this: a universal, taxpayer-seeded lifetime financial account invested in capital markets, whose purpose and potential evolves and grows right alongside its little beneficiary. So it’s worth stepping back to envision what an ideal program would look like years from now. Ideally, every child born in America would have an account automatically opened for them at birth, funded with additional government and philanthropic contributions for young people from low-income households that deliver balances that steadily grow with the child. These accounts would incorporate best-in-class financial education about saving and investing, helping kids build financial capability. Most importantly, the program would deliver meaningful wealth (tens of thousands of dollars, at least) to kids who don’t stand to inherit money. Such a program would create an essential piece of the shared American experience — with broad, bi-partisan support — that seems unimaginable in 2025, where the idea of a “shared American experience” feels permanently out of reach.

How do we get there? First, America needs its policymakers to ensure that accounts are opened for every child — and that means automatic enrollment. This is the top priority, and it’s at the top of the Aspen Institute Financial Security Program’s priority list until it happens.

Second, we will need more seed deposits — like the incredible commitment from the Dells or other states following Texas’ lead — for kids from low-income households. We’ll also need to shield the money in the accounts so they don’t trigger  “savings penalties,” commonly known as “asset limits,” that reduce access to necessary public benefits like SNAP. 

Finally, we need the best and brightest from banking and fintech to get creative, integrating America’s first lifelong investment account into a wide range of financial services with a high-quality, engaging user experience for families that includes financial education, easily enables ongoing contributions, and integrates 530A Accounts into daily financial life in America.

So how do we get to this inspiring future? Let’s start with what we know about these Accounts today, and then explore three different lifecycle moments that are screaming for design innovation. 

How 530A Accounts Will Work

Starting in 2026, every kid under age 18 with a Social Security number is eligible for an account, and babies born during the 2025-2028 pilot period — 3.6 million babies per year in America — will be eligible to receive $1,000 in taxpayer-provided seed funding in the account. Families will need to opt-in to opening a 530A Account during the tax filing process, using the new IRS form 4547, or use the www.trumpaccounts.gov portal starting midway through 2026. 

The funds in the account will be invested in an index of U.S. equities and left to grow untouched. When the child turns 18, they can withdraw funds penalty-free for specific wealth-building purposes, like education or homeownership. Because the account is a modified traditional IRA (with no earned income requirement for contributions), the money could also be left there to grow for retirement. And 530A Accounts are eligible for contributions from family, the parents’ employer, as well as philanthropies and state and local government. 

And here’s something different about these accounts: the drafters of the legislation envision a robust rollover ecosystem for 530As. The accounts will be opened initially with a financial services firm, or firms, that Treasury designates as the trustee, and we eagerly await the announcement of which firm, or firms, will play this role. But as recent Treasury guidance confirmed, any firm that offers Individual Retirement Accounts can eventually serve as a rollover trustee of a 530A Account. If we get this right, this policy could create a marketplace of firms competing and offering a variety of different Trump Account features, functionality, and financial services product bundling. For a federal policy timed to coincide with America’s 250th birthday, it feels fitting that we leverage some all-American market competition to jumpstart American kids’ successful financial lives.

And that’s where fintech innovators come in.

Calling All FinTech: Three Designable Moments in the 530A Account Lifecycle

We have spilled — and will continue to spill — lots of digital ink making the case for opt-out, automatic account opening as soon as possible. The evidence is overwhelming that a tax-time sign up process will leave millions of kids—–and especially kids from low-income households — behind. The answer to how we get all eligible kids an account is clear and stands on decades of research: automatic enrollment. Looking at early wealth building pilots, programs, and policies from around the country and world — not to mention the enormous 401(k) system that learned this lesson decades ago — automatic enrollment, which Treasury has the authority to implement and could use Social Security numbers to do, is essential for this policy to reach the kids who could most benefit. The state of Maine’s early wealth building program moved to an automatic enrollment model and immediately pushed participation from 40% in an opt-in model in 2012 to 100% in an opt-out model in 2013, saving money in the process by reducing promotional costs. Bottom line, the more households who end up with an account, the more kids from families with low income will arrive at 18 with thousands of dollars — and the more popular and durable this policy will be.

But automatic enrollment isn’t the only thing they need in order for our 2050 vision to come to life. We need to maximize the contributions flowing into the accounts, design the accounts with age-appropriate tools and features, and help them evolve into the portable retirement account that millions of American workers currently lack but desperately need.

Great design, cross-provider account integration, and creative collaboration can help with all of these goals. Here are three lifecycle moments that we’re eager for fintech innovators to help solve:

1. Babies can’t contribute to their own accounts, but parents and family can. How do we make it easy–and enable automatic contributions? We want to see as much money as possible flow into long-term savings — and into the accounts of kids from lower income households in particular. Our recent interviews with veterans of the British Child Trust Funds policy, a similar program launched in the UK in 2005 and ended in 2011, revealed that one of their chief regrets is that they didn’t put more muscle behind driving additional family and friends contributions to the accounts in service of increasing the policy’s popularity and improving provider economics.

So, how can we avoid that mistake? We need “easy contribution buttons” in the right places, integrated strategically into Americans’ financial lives, to maximize contribution and engagement while acknowledging the difficulty many families may have in “locking up” funds (beneficiaries can only access the funds at 18). A particular risk, especially for low- to moderate-income families, is that they are unaware of the restrictions on accessing funds and may try to dip into them in an emergency — only to find that they cannot access the funds, eroding trust in the policy. This design challenge is significant, but in our estimation surmountable. Banks and fintechs can help by ensuring that families understand that contributions to the Accounts cannot be accessed in an emergency. Financial institutions also have a tremendous opportunity to help here by providing easy access to high-quality liquid savings vehicles, too, alongside 530A Accounts. Transparent communication and high quality design need to go hand-in-hand.

One positive model that comes to mind is the way that Greenlight cards integrate with and sit alongside parents’ bank accounts, making it easy to embed a “Put $20 in Jackson’s Trump Account” button in the parent’s banking experience, and where they can access other resources as needed. You can imagine that a “Contribute” button could be added not only to bank or credit union accounts, but to Venmo or CashApp, too. With 145 million active monthly users between CashApp and Venmo, integrating 530A Account contributions into the user experience of these accounts could be powerful. 

An “easy button” for contributions to kids’ accounts could also be embedded within the annual tax filing process, when many low- and moderate-income households receive tax-credit-driven refunds to the tune of several thousand dollars. 

Another option for driving additional contributions could be consumption-based savings programs like Upromise, a longstanding loyalty program where cash rewards from parents’ or other family members’ spending can be deposited directly into a wide range of investment accounts. 

2. Teens are eligible, too. How can their 530A Account set them up for lifelong success with saving and investing as they begin to make financial decisions with their own money? One-third of teens have a part-time job, which means they could be gaining critical experience with saving and investing with money they have earned. As we know from research on financial literacy and education, people are primed to gain new financial skills at certain “teachable moments” in their financial lives — like starting a new job or buying a car. Beginning to earn money is a perfect “teachable moment” to help teenagers practice making decisions around short-term spending and saving, as well as long-term investing — especially when they have skin in the game.

To make the most of this “teachable moment”, teenagers could have a transaction account side-by-side with their 530A Account that gives them an easy or automatic way to contribute. More useful still would be a liquid or emergency savings account to sit in between the transaction account and the 530A Account, helping teens build that essential habit of saving for short- and long-term needs, practicing the important skill of  allocating money between “spend now”, “spend tomorrow”, and “spend years in the future” buckets. These buckets could work together, too, with the transactional account mimicking a 401(k) by automatically sweeping small amounts into emergency savings or the 530A Accounts, via either blunt-force default contribution settings or more sophisticated tools like Oportun that use algorithms or AI to analyze cash flow and make dynamic sweeps from transaction accounts to savings accounts. 

While we’re designing for teens, why not be thoughtful about all the ways 530A Accounts can prepare them for lifelong financial success? With the disappearance of defined benefit plans and the rise of defined contribution plans (like a 401(k)), which require workers to make investment decisions with their hard-earned savings, we need to help people get comfortable with some degree of market volatility. So there’s magic in providing children with a window into an investment account that’s theirs, allowing them to see how markets go up, and down, and back up again — but, over time, usually mostly up. This is an especially important opportunity for the kids and teens who will be first-generation investors — so how can we build an interface that’s fun and engaging (and maybe even cool, we say as two parents whose kids would cringe at our use of the word)?

3. Young adults need to invest for retirement. How can their 530A behave like a 401(k)? Fifty-six million American workers lack access to a workplace retirement savings plan — and with retirement savings having passed up home equity as the largest source of household wealth this matters not only for long-term retirement security, but also wealth-building generally. Roughly seventeen million of these workers are full-time gig and independent workers who skew younger, earn lower incomes, and aren’t attached to a workplace that offers a plan. Between 30-40% of workers cash out their retirement plans when they leave their job, totaling between $60-$105 billion annually in prematurely withdrawn savings. Because a 530A Account becomes a traditional IRA at age 18, these accounts could be a part of a long-term, portable solution for people who work part-time jobs, work for a small business without a workplace plan, or leave a job with a small 401(k) balance and need a retirement account to protect those tax-advantaged funds and keep them invested. Such a solution would save workers tens of thousands of dollars in net worth over their lifetime.

With smart integrations across the financial services ecosystem, we can make 530As, once they become traditional IRAs at age 18, behave more like a workplace retirement savings plan across the account lifecycle. From regular sweeps from bank accounts or payment apps or even independent entrepreneurs’ invoicing systems (mimicking paycheck deductions) to accepting matching contributions (like the coming-in-2027 Saver’s Match, meant to provide low-income savers with a government-provided retirement savings match), there’s a long list of ways we could innovate to make 530A  Accounts into a robust, highly effective tool for workers to build portable retirement security across their lifetime.

While we’re talking about retirement, it’s worth noting that even in a best case scenario, 530A Accounts, or any individual investment account, are not a substitute for the lifelong, guaranteed income that Social Security provides. This is especially true for Americans with little or no retirement savings, given the gaps in access already discussed.

What’s Next

Trump Accounts/530As have been designed and launched at a breakneck pace, and we anticipate that the launch year could be a bit rocky. The choice to go with opt-in account opening at tax time will likely leave out millions of kids from low-income households in the early going. But while we all work to diligently document early lessons and advance policy changes that will ultimately make them fully inclusive, we also need fintech designers, builders, and dreamers to help create the future. There are so many more designable moments—ones that haven’t occurred to any of us yet — and we need America’s fintech leaders to roll up their sleeves.

We’re hoping that a robust marketplace and ecosystem emerges for these accounts, fueling competition on the features that can drive measurable progress in wealth-building and financial inclusion, as well as low cost and high quality for consumers. This could be a watershed moment in which banks and fintechs step up creatively and collaboratively to perform an important service for America, creating a universal wealth-building system that works for everyone — and is built to last.

The opinions shared in this article are the author’s own and do not reflect the views of any organization they are affiliated with.

Open Banker curates and shares policy perspectives in the evolving landscape of financial services for free.

If an idea matters, you’ll find it here. If you find an idea here, it matters. 

Interested in contributing to Open Banker? Send us an email at [email protected].

But what can you actually DO about the proclaimed ‘AI bubble’? Billionaires know an alternative…

Sure, if you held your stocks since the dotcom bubble, you would’ve been up—eventually. But three years after the dot-com bust the S&P 500 was still far down from its peak. So, how else can you invest when almost every market is tied to stocks?

Lo and behold, billionaires have an alternative way to diversify: allocate to a physical asset class that outpaced the S&P by 15% from 1995 to 2025, with almost no correlation to equities. It’s part of a massive global market, long leveraged by the ultra-wealthy (Bezos, Gates, Rockefellers etc).

Contemporary and post-war art.

Masterworks lets you invest in multimillion-dollar artworks featuring legends like Banksy, Basquiat, and Picasso—without needing millions. Over 70,000 members have together invested more than $1.2 billion across over 500 artworks. So far, 25 sales have delivered net annualized returns like 14.6%, 17.6%, and 17.8%.*

Want access?

[Click here to skip the waitlist →]

_{Investing involves risk. Past performance not indicative of future returns. Reg A disclosures at masterworks.com/cd}