This year’s NAST conference brought together treasury leadership from across the country, and our team came ready to represent the full breadth of what we do: Sootchy’s 529 employer platform, the Sootchy Learning Exchange, our financial and mental wellness platform, and the community work of the Sootchy Charitable Foundation. With representation from every state in the room, we connected deeply with a handful who really got what we’re building: the top-down reach of Sootchy, meeting people through their employers, paired with the bottom-up reach of the Sootchy Charitable Foundation, meeting people in their own communities.
The treasurers of Connecticut, Vermont, Alabama, Ohio, and New Mexico stood out, each expressing genuine interest in both platforms. That dual interest matters. It means we’re positioned to meet a real range of state and community needs through Sootchy, SCF, or both together.
Divide and conquer. With five team members on the ground (David Adefeso, Stephen Jobe, Jaclyn Marshall, Bevon Joseph, and Essence Revels), we split across the sessions that mattered most and covered far more ground than any one of us could alone. We were in the rooms shaping the future of the field, from the employer channel and generational wealth-building to financial education and the future of 529 plans. Splitting up let us make real connections across every track at once.
The throughline of the whole event: holistic financial wellness for every person, regardless of skin color, education level, profession, or hometown. Sootchy marches to the beat of that same drum, so hearing it championed from the stage was energizing.
The push for tighter public-private partnerships. This was the idea that resonated most. Professor Darrick Hamilton of The New School, Connecticut Treasurer Erick Russell, and New Mexico Treasurer Laura Montoya were all passionate about systemically addressing access to economic opportunity. The model that landed was a clear one: private philanthropic organizations step in as research partners, running feasibility studies and building the vehicles that turn municipal proof-of-concept into reality, while public servants do the hard work of moving policy forward. Private organizations become the boots on the ground, reaching people where they are. That’s exactly the role Sootchy and SCF are built to play.
The path to embracing AI. AI was a recurring theme, including the session “The Next Chapter of 529 Plans: Trust, Technology and Stewardship” and plenty of hallway conversations. States are actively encouraging AI adoption, but with a firm emphasis on trust and controls. The questions treasurers kept asking:
- How are you embedding trust, empathy, and transparency into how you use AI?
- Will your data encryption still hold up ten years from now, when Quantum AI is a reality?
- How do you manage risk, and how will you handle things when they go sideways, in a way that protects the consumer?
The strongest internal control everyone came back to: keeping a human in the loop. Treasurers (including North Dakota’s Thomas Beadle and Arkansas’s Craig Johnson) were clear that if a state brings on a vendor, they expect that partnership to be an extension of their own due-diligence standards.
