Our Story

Our founding team has been on a mission for decades to improve the financial wellbeing of the middle class.

Hussain Zaidi CFP, founder & CEO of Budge, spent 12 years as a client facing financial advisor and specialized in comprehensive financial planning for the mass affluent client. Frustrated with the inability to offer the same quality service to his clients who had little investable assets, he attended Columbia Business School and subsequently launched Advizr with the mission to “turbo-tax” the financial planning process for clients who were underserved. After raising capital from Franklin Templeton, Allianz, IA Capital and more, the Advizr team scaled the offering to thousands of RIAs and well known Fortune 500 companies. In 2019, Advizr was acquired by Orion Advisor Services, a premiere portfolio accounting fintech.

Yan Avery, CTO of Budge, spent nearly 3 decades building innovative and highly scalable technology solutions for fast growing tech companies. Most recently, he led Montreal based fintech, Expertus Technologies, build its serverless wires and payments offering. Ultimately, he was a critical part of the M&A team that managed their acquisition by IBM in late 2020.

In 2021, Hussain and Yan joined forces to launch Budge. They are on a mission to build an advice platform for the majority of the country that does not get service from the traditional "asset management" industry because they have little investable assets. These employees are worried about covering unexpected expenses and managing suffocating debt. Budge is digitizing the ability for everyday Americans to "set-n-forget" employer and employee contributions directly to savings and debt accounts, in partnership with forward thinking payroll companies.