What Is the Hold-It Evidence Program, and Why Test Behavior First?

By Terence Exodus, Founder of Hold-It™

Hold-It has a big vision for how travel savings could work. But before we build the complicated parts — the banking relationships, the compliance work, the systems that move money — we want to know whether the most important part works at all.

That part isn't technology. It's behavior.

Here's the question underneath everything we're building: when a real traveler sets money aside for a real trip, can a little structure around that commitment help the money stay connected to its purpose until the trip arrives?

We don't know yet. The Hold-It Evidence Program is how we plan to find out.

If you'd like the everyday version of this problem first, we wrote it up in How to Keep a Travel Fund From Getting Absorbed Into Everyday Spending. This article is about what we're doing next.

So what exactly is the Evidence Program?

The Hold-It Evidence Program is a planned, controlled test of travel-saving behavior. Think of it as a small, carefully designed product-research program with real people and real trips — not a broad product launch.

For the first group of participants — what we call Cohort 1 — Hold-It plans to work with 30 U.S.-based adults who have genuine upcoming leisure trips.

Thirty is small on purpose. This is meant to be a close look at one question, not a broad consumer rollout.

What would a participant actually do?

Each participant would choose three things:

• A genuine upcoming leisure trip.
• A travel goal — the amount they want available for the trip.
• A rhythm for setting money aside — how often they plan to contribute.

Then they'd keep living their lives: saving toward the trip, paying for everything else, making the usual trade-offs. The difference is that, with their permission, Hold-It would observe account activity relevant to the program and help them see whether the commitment they made is holding up.

If you'd like to do the planning part yourself, we've written a walkthrough: How to Build a Savings Plan for an Upcoming Trip. You don't need Hold-It for any of it.

Where does the money live?

This is the part we most want to be clear about. The Evidence Program is non-custodial, which in this case means something simple: Hold-It never holds the participant's money.

Participants keep using a U.S. checking or savings account they already own and control. The money stays there. The rule for the whole program fits in five words:

Plaid is the connection service Hold-It plans to use. With a participant's permission, it lets Hold-It see approved account information from their bank. Hold-It is designed to use that connection to read, not to move anything. Every transfer into or out of savings happens because the participant made it, through their own bank or financial tools.

That's why the disclosure you'll see throughout Hold-It reads the way it does:

What the Evidence Program does not test

Just as important is what we've left out. The Evidence Program does not test:

• Hold-It holding or moving participant money.
• Hold-It freezing or locking money at an outside bank.
• Hold-It issuing cards.
• Hold-It operating the regulated financial infrastructure required to control customer funds.
• A financial Travel Lock that actually restricts how money can be used.
• Regulated banking operations.

Those ideas belong to Hold-It's longer-term vision. They aren't part of this program, and nothing here should be read as if they are.

Why not just build the whole thing?

Because the expensive, complicated infrastructure isn't necessarily the most important question.

A regulated version of Hold-It could require partners, approvals, security and operating controls, a way to move money, and ways to access it, such as cards, along with significant additional operational and compliance work. That's a serious undertaking, and it comes with serious responsibility for other people's money.

All of it would also rest on one assumption: that travelers will make a savings commitment for a trip, and that added structure around it can help them keep it. If that assumption doesn't hold, the machinery doesn't matter. If the behavioral premise holds, we'll have learned that before taking on the regulated infrastructure, partnerships, controls, approvals, and responsibilities required for money movement.

So that's the order we're working in. Before building the machinery around the behavior, we want to find out whether the behavior is worth building around. You can see how we're sequencing the work on our homepage.

Is there any research behind this?

Some. In 2020, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's Office of Research published a review of rigorous studies on what helps people build savings. On commitment, it found that the research generally suggests commitment mechanisms, including psychological ones like setting money aside for a specific purpose, can increase savings deposits or reduce withdrawals for some people.

The same review comes with cautions. Commitment strategies can backfire, for example when missing a target triggers financial penalties. Almost all of the rigorous evidence it covers on commitment comes from developing countries, and the review says it's largely unclear whether similar results would hold in the United States. And its focus is short-term savings, especially emergency savings, not trips specifically.

Separate CFPB staff research published in 2022 looked at data from one savings app and found that "guaranteed" saving rules — such as saving on payday or on a regular schedule — were associated with greater savings accumulation than "contingent" rules tied to spending or other events. That does not mean one rule works best for everyone, and it does not test Hold-It. It does reinforce the broader reason structure around saving behavior is worth examining.

That's why we treat outside research as a reason to ask the question, not as the answer. It can't tell us whether Hold-It's specific approach, with American travelers saving for trips, produces a meaningful signal. Only our own program can begin to answer that, and only for the people in it. If the idea is new to you, What Is Behavioral Saving? is a good place to start.

What will Hold-It look at?

Hold-It intends to examine five things:

• Do participants follow through on the saving commitments they set for themselves?
• Does the money set aside for the trip stay preserved — still there, or spent on the trip itself, which is what it's for?
• Does the experience make sense to the people going through it?
• Is the account information participants choose to share usable enough to learn from?
• Does the technology work reliably enough to support a meaningful decision?

We're setting the measures before the program begins, not after we see what happened. And thirty people can't tell us what's true for everyone. What they can tell us is whether there's a signal worth following.

What a good result would — and wouldn't — mean

Say the program goes well. Participants follow through, travel money stays connected to the trip, and the technology holds up. That would be encouraging. It still wouldn't prove that a regulated Hold-It product would work, or that it should be built.

Testing whether travelers keep a commitment is one question. Proving that a regulated financial product is safe, compliant, and worth building is another. Any future regulated product would depend on partners, approvals, legal and compliance requirements, and decisions that haven't been made.

A weaker or mixed result would be valuable too — maybe about the idea, maybe about how we tested it. Either way, we'd rather learn it before building the expensive parts.

There are no results yet.

Let's be plain about where things stand.

• The Evidence Program is still being built and prepared.
• Results from the first group don't exist yet.
• Nothing in this article proves that Hold-It improves saving behavior.
• Nothing in this article proves that Hold-It prevents people from spending travel savings.

If and when there are findings to share, we'll describe what the program actually observed — and we won't claim more than it shows.

Why we're being this careful

We believe there may be something worth building here. We're not going to pretend it's proven before we test it.

That restraint isn't a hedge. It's the plan: learn the behavior first, build the machinery only if the evidence supports it, and tell you plainly where things stand along the way.

Curious whether you could be part of the first group? Holding your spot joins the early Hold-It community, but it doesn't guarantee selection. Participation will depend on eligibility, program capacity, and applicable requirements, and our FAQ explains who we expect to recruit. Why I'm building Hold-It this way, and who's behind it, is on the About page.