Jeff Rosenberger and Guideline’s mission to provide 401(k)s to small businesses

investmentnews.com:

Jeff Rosenberger is about as close to a “lifer” as one can get in the relatively new financial technology industry.

Growing up just north of San Francisco in Marin County, Rosenberger was exposed to financial products at an early age by his father, a executive with FICO, and mother, a researcher with the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. After earning a bachelor’s degree in statistics from the University of California, Berkeley — which allowed him to take classes in computer science on the side— and a master’s from Stanford, Rosenberger worked for big data companies, often for large bank customers.

He moved fully into fintech in 2010 when he joined Wealthfront, then known as kaChing, as it was pivoting toward automated investing. In June, the company said it oversees $43 billion in assets.

In 2015, Rosenberger got in early on Earnest, a digital lending company, that was acquired two years later by student loan servicer Navient for $155 million.  

Now Rosenberger is chief operating officer of Guideline, a fintech company trying to modernize retirement plans for small and midsize businesses. Guideline was founded by a former TaskRabbit executive who, exasperated by the experience of finding a retirement plan for a rapidly growing technology startup, decided to build a digital record record keeper from the ground up. Rosenberger joined in 2016 to bring in more experience with financial products.

Since launching in 2015, Guideline has grown to 40,000 customers and $9 billion in assets under management.

While plenty of fintech companies are working in the defined-contribution space, Guideline is unique for its emphasis on integrating with digital payroll companies, Rosenberger said. Building a record-keeping system