S 01 | Ep 60 From Soldiers to Savvy Savers Kellie Richter , EVP and Chief Marketing and Client Experience Officer at First Command Financial Services , joins the show to share how a mission - driven financial services company has built a differentiated brand by putting military families at the true center of everything it does . Kellie introduces her three C ' s framework from her American Express years , built around clarity of mission , consistency of experience , and the honest acknowledgment that control of the brand now belongs to customers who can say anything about you online . Kellie shares one of the most counterintuitive findings from First Command ' s sixteen years of monthly research , which is that four out of five military spouses are the primary financial decision - makers in the family , not the active duty service members the company had originally built its model around , a discovery that came not from internal analysis but from deliberately including spouses in their military advisory board sessions . Kellie addresses the challenge of communicating complex financial information under heavy regulatory constraints , arguing that the goal is always to be understood rather than to push a message , and that transparency about fees and service models is the foundation of trust in financial relationships .