After Prison, James Catledge Is Betting Americans Need a New Kind of Financial Score

TAMPA — Americans have been conditioned to know—or at least worry about—their credit score. That three-digit number can determine whether someone qualifies for a mortgage, finances a car or receives a favorable interest rate.

Financial-services veteran James Catledge believes Americans may be paying attention to the wrong score.

His new company, Financial Scoring, is built around a different question: Are you financially prepared for retirement?

Catledge calls the answer a person's “financial score,” a measurement intended to evaluate retirement preparedness and tax efficiency while identifying areas that may require attention. His argument is that a traditional credit score measures someone's ability to borrow money but says little about whether that person is prepared to live for decades after leaving the workforce.

The idea has an unusual origin.

A Career Interrupted

Before his legal troubles, Catledge says he spent roughly 35 years in financial services and led an organization involving more than 8,000 licensed financial advisers. That career was disrupted after Catledge was indicted in a mail-fraud case and subsequently served time in federal prison. He continues to maintain that he did not commit the crime.

While incarcerated, Catledge began thinking about whether decades of financial experience could still be useful even if he never again personally advised clients.

His answer was technology.

Catledge envisioned a system capable of taking the questions, patterns and risks he had spent decades examining and turning them into a repeatable process. That concept eventually became Financial Scoring, which Catledge says uses patented technology and artificial intelligence to help consumers and financial professionals identify potential weaknesses in retirement planning.

The ambition is considerable: Catledge says he wants to make the basic assessment available to every American at no cost.

Sixty Seconds, 13 Questions

The concept is deliberately simple.

The Huntsville Press tested the scoring engine. After answering 13 questions in roughly 60 seconds, the system immediately generated a financial score of 63, along with a report identifying areas where the financial plan could potentially be improved.

The system then offered the choice of speaking with an assigned scoring analyst or simply taking the report and using the information independently.

Perhaps the most interesting feature was the temptation to change answers and see what happened to the score.

That turns retirement planning—something that can seem distant and complicated—into a more immediate question:

What would I have to change to make this number go up?

A Score Is Only the Beginning

There are important limitations.

Thirteen questions cannot capture the complete financial circumstances of an individual or family, and a 60-second assessment isn't a replacement for personalized financial advice. The value of such a system ultimately depends upon its methodology, assumptions and the quality of any recommendations produced from it.

Financial Scoring will also have to earn consumers' trust. Questions remain about how the score is calculated, how personal information is handled and whether its recommendations consistently improve financial decision-making.

But Catledge's larger idea is intriguing.

America has built an enormous financial infrastructure around a number measuring how effectively people borrow.

Catledge wants consumers thinking about a different number—one measuring how effectively they are preparing for the day when they stop working.

For Catledge, it is also a remarkable second act: a financial professional whose career appeared to have ended in prison attempting to use technology and artificial intelligence to put decades of experience back to work.

His premise can be reduced to one provocative question:

You know your credit score. But do you know your financial score?