Cortex's first pillar is Accuracy. MaxiFi makes it a fact: for a customer's facts and assumptions, it solves — not guesses — the lifetime plan, every dollar of taxes and Social Security computed under current law. Own it, and Robinhood runs the one play no competitor can lawfully copy — a substantiated accuracy claim backed by a bounded Accuracy Guarantee — with the liability defense included beneath it.
The growth case →Request the briefingDecember 16: Cortex, “the interface for all of Robinhood” — Accuracy, Personalization, Action. June 3: Cortex for Advisors, into TradePMR. July 1: agentic trading ships, and your CEO says every capability a human can do will be available to an AI agent. Every one of those agents converges on the question your customers are aging into — what should I actually do with my money? — and today every answer in the industry is an estimate.
Schwab says smart. Fidelity says personalized. Coinbase and Webull say powerful. None of them — and no AI lab — can substantiate the claim that matters. MaxiFi can: a deterministic engine that solves the lifetime plan for a household's facts and assumptions — every dollar of taxes and Social Security computed under current law, the same inputs producing the same answer every time, with an audit trail.
That changes what the claim is. Backed by the pedigree — thirty years of Laurence Kotlikoff's economics, taught with at MIT Sloan by Nobel laureate Robert Merton — and by the reproducible computations themselves, the accuracy claim stops being puffery and becomes a substantiated statement of fact. And determinism unlocks what a claim alone never could: a bounded Accuracy Guarantee with a defined remedy — the play that built TurboTax's franchise, never before available in planning, insurable only because the math is exact.
The substantiation regime that polices financial advertising — FINRA 2210's fair-and-not-misleading standard, FTC substantiation doctrine — protects this claim. Rivals can run vague accuracy language; what they cannot run is your claim: the specific, falsifiable, guaranteed one. Copying it without the engine is a false claim regulators, NAD panels, and Lanham Act suits will punish.
“The only plan we can guarantee adds up” — advertising with a substantiation file behind it, in a category where no competitor can lawfully match the claim.
Guaranteed-accurate lifetime planning is the un-copyable Gold feature — the reason Gold pays for itself, at 4.3M-subscriber scale.
$27.4B in retirement assets, +90% YoY. The auditable claiming, Roth, and withdrawal answer is the strongest transfer argument an aging-in base has ever been handed.
Customers leave interfaces. They don't leave the firm that stands behind their plan with a guarantee.
| Schwab / Fidelity | Coinbase / Webull | Robinhood + MaxiFi | |
|---|---|---|---|
| The advice claim | “Personalized guidance” | “Powerful tools” | “Provably correct” — substantiated |
| Behind the claim | Heuristics + Monte Carlo | Content + calculators | Deterministic optimization, audit trail |
| Can rivals copy it? | The words, not the proof | The words, not the proof | Imitation = a false claim, policed by regulators |
One quarter of media behind the claim, against your own funnel, answers what no forecast can. Owning MaxiFi is the exclusive right to run that play — and to deny the result to Schwab, Fidelity, Coinbase, and Webull permanently. It is a revenue line, not a legal reserve.
MaxiFi (Economic Security Planning, Inc.) uses consumption smoothing and dynamic programming to compute the single, mathematically optimal lifetime plan — solving simultaneously across Social Security strategy, federal and state taxes, Roth-conversion sequencing, withdrawal order, insurance sizing, and upside investing. For a household's facts and assumptions it solves — not guesses: same inputs, same answer, every time, with an audit trail.
Prof. Laurence Kotlikoff — William Fairfield Warren Professor at Boston University; Harvard Ph.D.; former Senior Economist, President's Council of Economic Advisers; named by The Economist among the 25 most influential economists.
Taught with at MIT Sloan by Nobel laureate Robert Merton as an “outstanding science-based lifecycle and retirement management platform” (Merton does not endorse products); featured in Bankrate's “Best financial planning software of 2025” roundup. The economics trace to Nobel-recognized lifecycle work.
Patented algorithms and thirty years of continuously maintained federal/state tax, Social Security, and benefit rules with a validation record — exactly the IP a language model cannot reverse-engineer and a build team cannot shortcut.
Larry Kotlikoff intends to stay on with the acquirer — to integrate the engine, validate the training and guarantee programs, and continue as spokesperson. The acquirer buys the engine and keeps the economist who built it.
Cortex consumer, Gold, and Cortex for Advisors keep the conversation; MaxiFi computes the plan underneath — and the guarantee ships with it. The engine inside, not a layer bolted on: deterministic, auditable outputs under the interface you already built. Larry Kotlikoff stays on to integrate and as spokesperson.
This is the first FINRA examination cycle to treat generative AI as a standalone topic — Rule 3110 supervision reaching the reliability and accuracy of the AI model, Reg Notice 24-09 reaching embedded third-party tools, no safe harbor for novel technology. Under Cortex, MaxiFi converts scaled planning answers from an examination liability into an examination exhibit: computed, verifiable, reproducible, with an audit trail an examiner and a fiduciary can stand behind.
And the engine ships with the architecture that keeps the floor solid under an advertised claim: assumptions and law-table version disclosed on every output, customer input attestation, versioned rule tables with re-run notices on law changes, and the Accuracy Guarantee's defined remedy. The audit trail proves each customer was told exactly what was — and wasn't — promised.
We price the asset on the growth case above. The defense beneath it is a term of the deal, not the deal — and, like the claim itself, it is denied to every competitor the day it is yours.
A frontier model's retirement “smile” ran 13% too low in each of a real household's 40 remaining years against MaxiFi's computed path — dated, dollar-specific, reproducible.
Four frontier AIs sized the same father's coverage at $1.3M, $1.4M, and $3.8M — against MaxiFi's internally consistent $2.09M. Every shortcut the AIs used is programmable — and wrong.
One retirement question, three frontier engines, three different verdicts — with MIT's Andrew Lo noting these tools carry no best-interest duty. The category estimates; the divergence is the proof.
The tests publish to 145,000+ subscribers and counting — credibility no rival in the category can match, and it conveys with the acquisition.
Larry spent thirty years building what Wall Street sells to millionaires — for everyone else. We are running a deliberately narrow process for the home that actually means it about democratizing finance. That is why this conversation.
The next step: a 30-minute briefing — MaxiFi solves a real household's lifetime plan, live, while a frontier model is asked to match it. The gap is the thesis; the funnel is the price.
Michael Kane, Ph.D., J.D. · Managing Partner, Kane & Company · FINRA / SEC / SIPC–Registered Investment Bank
Commerce@kaneco.com · 310-441-5263 · Representing Economic Security Planning, Inc.