Our Brand Story

The value of each large stone was not determined by its size or quantity, but by the effort taken to attain it, along with trust that it would retain value. The RaiStone brand is about the trust and effort that is represented in the historic Rai stone. While all financial professionals have access to tools and resources, you want to work with a financial planner you trust.

More than just the financial architecture of math and numbers, your financial plan should include strategy, structure, and a personalized design to help you to achieve your goals. Like each individual Rai stone, the intrinsic value of your portfolio, or business is not an amount, but rather a combination of efforts made towards your aspirations, and the trust you place in your financial professional to help you achieve them.

On the Micronesian island of Yap, large "Rai" stones represented money; yet the value of each stone was not determined by size, nor quantity.

Instead, value was associated with trust, effort, and personal history.

Yap uniquely has no rock or stone formations of its own, which created a simple scarcity. The Yapese people chose to use this scarcity as a mechanism for storing and transferring wealth. To do so, they commissioned trips by large canoe to a neighboring island Palau, some 250 miles away, to secure and return large stone discs, or “Rai,” to be used as “money.” The value of the Rai was dependent on the work and risk it took to get the stone to Yap.

Once the stones reached Yap, they remained sedentary. The transfer of ownership was recorded in the public oral record. This created a simple, yet effective, mechanism for transferring and storing wealth. The entire system was built on one word, trust. This is not much different than today’s digital monetary system. Our wealth, or account values, are measured and reported digitally. Each individual must trust that the institution they do business with has their account value on the books. We must trust that the currency earned for a day’s work is legal tender. The Rai Stone is an example of trust and its inseparable place in our system of currency and wealth. It is upon this rock that we have built our brand.