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Finovate Blog
Tracking fintech, banking & financial services innovations since 1994
The launch of Cheese, a digital banking platform dedicated to serving Asian American communities, is the latest instance of entrepreneurs seeking to translate a renewed sense of ethnic identity among many Americans into greater financial wellness, if not empowerment, for those in their communities.
“I have always envisioned launching a digital banking platform that someone like me could easily access but also serves a deeper purpose, with the power to positively impact Asian communities,” Cheese CEO Ken Lian said. “Cheese is that banking platform.”
Cheese includes Ifly.vc and Amplify among its chief investors, having raised $3.6 million in seed funding from the two firms in a round that also featured participation from former Wealthfront CEO Adam Nash and Zillow co-founder Spencer Rascoff. As part of the company’s offering, Cheese accountholders get a debit card (issued by Coastal Community Bank), two-day early advance pay with direct deposit, a 3% deposit bonus for referrals, a 0.3% annual percentage yield, and as much as 10% cash back on purchases at more than 10,000 participating merchants.
And as part of its pledge to support Asian American communities, Cheese will donate $100,000 to nonprofit organizations and community service programs that support Asian neighborhoods and small businesses – especially those impacted by COVID-19. Communities in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York City are among the first areas of focus.
The Asian American community is characterized by its diversity and its rapid growth; there are nearly 21 million Asian Americans in the United States. The relatively high income and education levels common in this community compared to other minority communities in the United States makes them an attractive opportunity for providers in financial services – from digital banking to wealth management.
At the same time, the rising number of incidents of violence against Asian Americans in 2021 are reminders that discrimination and racism against Asian Americans continues to be a challenge in a rapidly-diversifying country. In financial services, this issue often manifests itself most acutely with new Asian immigrants who may have language barriers or lack a credit history and struggle to even secure a bank account. Lian, who immigrated to the U.S. from China in 2008, knows this problem well.
“I had been declined multiple times for basic bank accounts,” Lian said, “even with an 800+ FICO score.”
Cheese is headquartered in Pasadena, California. The company was founded in 2019.
Among the more popular members of our regular roster of Finovate speakers is Jeremy Balkin. An expert in retail bank management, fintech innovation, and strategic digital partnerships, Balkin spent six years as Head of Innovation with HSBC USA where he was part of the team that introduced humanoid robot Pepper to HSBC’s flagship Fifth Avenue branch.
So what’s new? Balkin announced today that he has joined JP Morgan Chase & Company as its new Head of Fintech and Innovation for Wholesale Payments. In his new capacity, Balkin will supervise fintech and innovation initiatives for wholesale payments, as well as help advise the company with regards to potential investments and partnerships with companies that can help JP Morgan become more effective in the space. JP Morgan’s wholesale payments business moves $7 trillion every day.
Balkin most recently shared his insights with Finovate audiences last fall as part of FinovateWest Digital. His discussion centered on how financial institutions can use innovations in customer experience to win new customers and better engage current ones. Adding new services, products, and rewards, Balkin argued, is a better strategy for most financial institutions than “the dead-end of price competition”. This customer-centric approach, which embraces fintech innovation, is all the more vital in a world in which Big Tech is effectively leveraging its digital platforms to offer financial services to its increasingly digitally-native customers.
In addition to his public appearances and work with banks and fintechs, Balkin is also an author. His books include Investing with Impact: Why Finance is a Force for Good and Millennialization of Everything: How to Win When Millennials Rule the World. We wish him luck in his new opportunity with JP Morgan Chase and look forward to seeing him on the Finovate stage again soon.
New York-based NYDIG is a leading provider of technology and investment solutions for Bitcoin. Founded in 2017 by Robert Gutmann (CEO) and Ross Stevens (Executive Chairman), NYDIG offers banks, corporations, insurers, and high net worth (HNW) individuals financing, custody, execution, and research and advisory services to help them manage their Bitcoin holdings. NYDIG also offers industry-leading expertise in the derivatives markets for institutional investors seeking customized opportunities, from generating yield to establishing hedges.
This week’s financing takes the company’s total funding to $305 million, according to Crunchbase. The strategic partners involved included Stone Ridge Holdings Group, Morgan Stanley, New York Life, MassMutual, Soros Fund Management, FS Investments, Bessemer Venture Partners, and FinTech Collective.
“These partnerships leave no doubt that institutional adoption of Bitcoin has arrived and, further, that NYDIG is the partner of choice for serious financial services firms with the highest fiduciary and diligence standards,” Gutmann said. He announced that the company plans to deliver “an explosion of innovation in Bitcoin products and services” over the balance of the year.
Gutmann also added that the round’s investors will help NYDIG on “strategic initiatives” ranging from investment management and banking to clean energy and insurance. To underscore the point, the company’s statement also reported that life, annuity, and property & casualty insurers currently own in aggregate more than $1 billion of direct and indirect Bitcoin exposure. This exposure is both facilitated exclusively by NYDIG and is held in the firm’s secure, audited, and insured institutional custody platform.
“As a notable advocate for financial institutions, Nymbus stood out as a partner to take our vision for Bitcoin and banking to the next level,” NYDIG Head of Bank Solutions Patrick Sells said when the partnership was announced. “As a former banker and technology evangelist, I couldn’t be more excited to bring Bitcoin and banking together, and I see it as a win/win.”
M1 Finance has raised another $75 million in funding to support its finance super app, which combines investing, borrowing, and spending functionality into a single platform. The Series D round was led by Coatue, and featured participation from Left Lane Capital, Jump Capital, and Clocktower Technology Ventures.
The investment brings M1 Finance’s total capital to more than $173 million, $153 million of which was raised in just the last ten months.
In a blog post, company founder and CEO Brian Barnes said that the funding will help M1 Finance add talent and “invest in innovation that furthers our mission.” Barnes wrote that rather than merely “incentivizing trading”, the goal of M1 Finance is to offer a “holistic, smart platform that encourages and enables you to practice good financial habits.” He added that this meant innovating in all areas of the customer experience – from more tools to better interfaces to a more seamless integration “with your whole financial life.”
M1 Finance’s platform includes three components: M1 Invest enables users to build their own investment portfolio for free and manage the portfolio with automatic, one-click rebalancing. Fractional share investing is also available. M1 Borrow offers a flexible portfolio line of credit for accounts of $10,000 or more, and M1 Spend gives users a checking account to make it easier for them to repay their loans on time, as well as set up direct deposits and schedule automatic investments.
In his blog post, Barnes also shared some recent milestones for the Chicago, Illinois-based company. M1 Finance topped $3 billion in client assets last month, reported a 3x increase in new sign-ups in January 2021 compared to the previous month, and noted a 2.5x growth in new sign-ups between January 26 and February 8 compared to the previous two weeks.
“We’re building (an) experience for people with thousands and millions,” he wrote. “Whether you have $50 million or $50,000 we want you to have the right tools, the right education, and the right control over your future.”
A Finovate alum since its conference debut in 2016, M1 Finance has partnered with the likes of Rackspace Technology and, in December, launched a new “smart transfers” feature. The fully customizable solution enables those subscribed to M1 Finance’s M1 Plus program to set “threshold-based rules to cascade available funds between M1 accounts.”
In a world of rebrands, reintroductions, and redirections, it is always impressive to see a pivot that sticks.
Moven, which announced its transition toward financial wellness and distributed smart banking a year ago this month, has teamed up with fellow Finovate alum Digital Onboarding. Together, the two fintechs will support user adoption of a turn-key digital bank-in-a-box, making it easier for banks and financial institutions to improve customer engagement on digital platforms.
“The pace of digital disruption in the banking industry is only going to quicken, and financial institutions have to rethink how they leverage digital channels,” Moven founder and Executive Chairman Brett King said. “Providing a new channel is one thing; getting existing and new customers to embrace that channel is an entirely different challenge, and frankly a tremendous opportunity for bankers.”
The partnership brings together Moven’s ability to provide users with data-driven, actionable insights into their financial health with Digital Onboarding’s digital messaging, personalized microsites, and proprietary action widgets to make account-related services more accessible and streamlined. The collaboration recognizes the challenge that digital banks represent to traditional banks and credit unions, and seeks to give them the tools to keep their own customers and better engage new, more digitally-demanding, ones.
“Neobanks are raising billions of dollars and investing heavily in advertising to lure U.S, consumers away from traditional financial institutions,” Digital Onboarding CEO Ted Brown said. “Now is the time for banks and credit unions to double down on investing in their existing customer and member bases. I am excited to collaborate with Moven to help banks and credit unions build long-lasting relationships by motivating financially health behaviors.”
The collaboration between Moven and Digital Onboarding is the most recent, big partnership Moven has entered into since its pivot. Late last year, the company announced that it was working on a turnkey digital bank-in-a-box project with another Finovate alum, Q2. Picking up its second patent for its financial wellness technology in January, Moven also has worked recently with New York-based digital asset manager NYDIG and Japan-based Kyushu Financial Group.
Speaking of NYDIG, the company secured $200 million in funding earlier this week in a round led by Stone Ridge Holdings Group and other strategic partners.
Moven will leverage its relationship with NYDIG to offer banks plugins that will enable them to offer bitcoin-related products. Moven CEO and CRO Kesh Talwar put the NYDIG partnership in the broader context of fintech and cryptocurrency’s parallel, but distinct paths toward prominence. “The growth of fintech platforms and of cryptocurrencies have both been striking, but the two worlds have largely been separate.” And because consumers are most likely to try new technologies when they are introduced by institutions they trust, Talwar sees a clear path to boosting cryptocurrency adoption by enabling banks to play a bigger part.
NYDIG Head of Bank Solutions Patrick Sells concurred. “Many banks have felt left behind with the rise of fintech, but today, banks have the opportunity to capitalize on the fact that their customers strongly prefer them to be in the lead when it comes to Bitcoin.”
In its biggest fundraising to date, U.K.-based challenger bank Starling Bank has secured ($376 million) £270m in funding. The Series D round was led by Fidelity Management and Research. Also participating in investment were the Qatar Investment Authority, RPMI Railpen, and Millennium Management.
Starling hopes to use the capital to grow its lending book and to expand throughout Europe. M&A activity is also on the table for the digital challenger. The fundraising, which remains subject to regulatory approval, will give the neobank a pre-money valuation of £1.1 billion.
Founded by Anne Boden and headquartered in London, Starling now has more than two million accounts, including 300,000 SME business accounts. Starling Bank says that it has 5% of the small business market in the country, as well as deposits of more than £5.4 billion. The firm has made loans valued at more than £2 billion – much of that while participating in the government’s COVID financial relief programs.
“Digital banking has reached a tipping point,” Boden said in a statement announcing the investment. “Customers now expect a fairer, smarter and more human alternative to the banks of the past and that is what we are giving them at Starling as we continue to grow and add new products and services. Our new investors will bring a wealth of experience as we enter the next stage of growth, while the continued support of our existing backers represents a huge vote of confidence.”
Starling reached profitability late last year. Since then, the company has forged partnerships with iZettle, Dingy Insurance, PensionBee, and Finovate alum SumUp. Boden has hinted recently that an IPO could be “two to three years” away for the digital challenger. “I didn’t do all of this to sell out to a big bank,” she said.
As our recent conversation featuring Boss Insights founder and CEO Keren Moynihan, reminds us, the fintechs (and “TechFins”) of the Great White North are engaged in some of the most forward-looking innovation on the continent.
This week brings an above average volume of news from Canada’s ambitious real-time payments industry. For one, the Vancouver Bullion & Currency Exchange (VBCE) announced a partnership with EMQ to bring “near real-time” cross-border payments to businesses and consumers across Canada. A PSP as well as a foreign currency exchange, VBCE hopes that its partnership with the global financial settlement network will give its customers the ability to move money faster and more efficiently. The firm also anticipates being able to use EMQ’s network to bring new services to market and scale existing ones.
“The speed and reach of EMQ’s global network allows us to pilot new services in one market and scale them rapidly across others to meet the evolving customer needs,” VBCE VP of Business Development Kevin Ma said. “This is especially important for our business with a diverse product portfolio.”
Elsewhere on the Canadian real-time payments beat, Payments Canada announced a collaboration with debit network Interac to support real-time payments in the country. Interac will serve as the exchange solution provider for Real-Time Rail, the real-time payments systems operated by Payments Canada and regulated by the Bank of Canada. RTR, scheduled to go live in 2022, will enable Canadians to initiate payments and receive funds in seconds.
Payments Canada President and CEO Tracey Black said that RTR will be the “foundation for faster, data-rich payments” and will serve as a “platform for innovation.” Black also praised Interac as a “well-suited partner” with the requisite infrastructure and connectivity to support “the rapid adoption of real-time payments in Canada.”
Last, some developments on the Canadian neobank front. Toronto, Ontario-based challenger bank KOHO added a no-fee savings account to its offerings this week. KOHO Save gives account holders 1.2% interest on their entire balance. There are no teaser rates and no minimum balance is required to acquire an account, which is available on the KOHO app.
“We’re excited to add KOHO Save to our product line as a simple and valuable money earning tool for Canadians,” KOHO CEO and founder Daniel Eberhard said. “We’ve been able to build a savings tool that doesn’t follow the same restrictions of most other savings products on the market. People just want to access their money freely and earn a great interest rate. We think Save is a wonderful step in that direction.”
KOHO also offers a savings and checking account and gives users a minimum of 0.5% (up to 10%) cash back on all purchases. KOHO Premium account holders get an additional 2% cash back on three major spending categories. The company, founded in 2014 and headquartered in Toronto, Ontario, has raised $57.5 million in funding from investors including Drive Capital and Portag3 Ventures.
Here is our look at fintech innovation around the world.
Israel-based Rewire, a cross-border digital banking firm that serves migrant workers, announced $20 million Series B round led by Finovate alum OurCrowd.
“With more and more people around the world growing anxious about the consequences of climate change, the need for solutions and initiatives that empower people to take action to help protect our planet has become a business imperative,” Meniga CEO and co-founder Georg Ludviksson said.
Carbon Insight enables users to estimate and track how their spending decision impacts the environment via their carbon footprint. This footprint is derived via the Meniga Carbon Index, which was developed by a team of data scientists who leveraged environment research into the carbon emissions of various products and services. Carbon Insight works by multiplying spending transaction amounts by a “carbon intensity value” to give the user a reasonable carbon footprint estimate. This information can be used to help inform the user to which activities are potentially more environmentally impactful.
“We have seen great enthusiasm for our Carbon Insight product over the past few months, from banks and other key financial players, which is an encouraging sign from our industry that more green initiatives are still to come,” Ludviksson said.
As part of the partnership with Meniga, Íslandsbanki has agreed to integrate Carbon Insight into its digital banking solution. The Icelandic bank sees the new offering as a way to increase customer engagement and build on its environmental, social, and governance (ESG) strategy.
“Consumers are increasingly interested in improving their carbon footprint and having a positive impact on the environment,” Birna Einarsdóttir, Íslandsbanki CEO said. “Meniga’s Carbon Insight solution will enable Íslandsbanki’s customers to estimate the carbon footprint of their private consumption, identify carbon intensive purchases, and ultimately reduce their carbon footprint while saving money at the same time.”
With Black History Month drawing to a close and Women’s History Month just underway, now is an excellent opportunity to look at some of the ways that fintechs and financial services companies are responding to the needs of women- and ethnic minority-owned small businesses and their employees.
This is a story about how three companies – a Canadian fintech and Finovate alum named Boss Insights, a diversity-focused neobank called Paybby, and one of the biggest African-American banks Carver Federal Savings Bank – came together to help struggling small business owners survive in a world made even more unequal by the global pandemic.
Can you tell us how the collaboration began?
Richard Muskus, SVP and CRO Carver Federal Savings Bank: The collaboration began as Carver was in the late stages of assessing and negotiating a technology solution for our PPP platform with a large well- known national firm and there was a great deal of urgency to have this platform in place to meet the upcoming government program launch.
Facing a delay in setting up an all-hands call to finalize planning, we were introduced to Boss Insights and Paybby who engaged Carver within hours and moved to demo and agreement within 48 hours. As impressed as we were with the tech, we were as equally impressed with the speed by which Carver was up and running.
Hassan Miah, founder and CEO, Paybby: When PPP came out, the first round, people of color were underrepresented. Either they didn’t know (about the program) or they had issues getting their data. We went around and looked at what platform would be the best that would help these communities do better in this next round.
We did a deep dive on multiple platforms, including Boss Insights’ platform, and we saw they they had an architecture and a product that would best serve the community we are focused on.
Why is it important for you to be involved in this round of the PPP?
Keren Moynihan, founder and CEO, Boss Insights: We were having meeting after meeting and reading article after article about the program and someone said to me at one point: “You’re a female founder. Can you tell me what you’re doing to help diverse and minority companies survive?”
When someone says something like that it resonates in your head and you just don’t stop thinking about it. In the first round of PPP only 14% of participants reported their demographic information. But in that 14%, 16% were female-owned companies and 18% visible minorities. If you look at that and compare it to the actual number of businesses run by females or by visible minorities there is a large difference. “Boss” in Boss Insights stands for “back office software systems” and insights on those. We are a data-driven company and so when you look at those numbers it’s clear that something had to be done.
Muskus: Serving the needs of our communities is foundational to the organization since 1948 and not only being involved, but being a leader in the PPP is representative of our mission.
What is gained when fintechs and neobanks and community banks collaborate?
Muskus: Partnering with firms such as a Boss Insights and Paybby allows small community banks such as Carver to provide customers with the highest quality of service and is incredibly important in our growth and impact in the market.
Miah: When we first got involved, Carver and some of banks we talked with told us that in the Black community many people don’t even have a bank account. We saw this as an opportunity to provide that account and then support them on their loan efforts.
Many of these small businesses are small Mom and Pop businesses, many of them work out of their back pockets: they use their regular personal checking account, make no distinction between their social security number and EIN, and those kinds of things. So we saw that they needed these services – and wanted them. There’s a lot of opportunity there.
Moynihan: The piece that has become much clearer to me is that we have been focusing so much to make sure that this technology works seamlessly, that it can get onboarded in one hour – meaning any lender who wants to support businesses and measure them on their merit, they’re one hour away from doing it.
You can sometimes get so into that rabbit hole that you forget about the reason you started to begin with. Business owners, they are people, with families and children, and what we want is to give them the ability to go to a lender and say: this is me, this is my package of information, please evaluate me. Don’t look at extraneous details – look at me and tell me if I am a good bet.
How will you measure success and what insights have you gained from the partnership?
Muskus: Our success is measured primarily by how successful our customers view Carver being. The successful delivery of our products and services leveraging these types of partnerships is representative of the choices we make in partnering to begin with.
Miah: Part of our goal is to bring data science to the community in a way that is usable. One reason we bought banking app Wicket is that it categorizes your spending. Our vision is you go from having a bank account where you just spend money and your account starts at $500 and it goes down to $50 to where you start saying, “hey I spent $100 on Starbucks . Did I really need to do that when I can’t even feed my family.” The idea is to marry the data with the use case, and now we have the technology and the know how to not just tell people “oh you ought to learn how to do better and think about managing (your finances)”, but the tools and technologies and everything are there and available.
Moynihan: When you’re a business and you’re asking for money from a bank, the first thing they do is they send you a laundry list of information they need to get from you. (But) if you have a connection to where they are collecting it, and it’s on the cloud, you can get it in real-time. So whether it’s accounting information for businesses that have made it that far, banking information for ones who are just starting out, or credit scores which will continue to get better, you can have access to the information in real time. The industry is called the “financial services industry”. (Now) lenders can focus on the services part of that, not on the data administration part. That’s what we’re all doing here together, that’s the real crux of the collaboration.
Founded in 2017 and headquartered in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, Boss Insights made its Finovate debut two years ago at FinovateFall. At the event, company founder and CEO Keren Moynihan demonstrated Boss Insights’ Smart Capital platform, which leverages data-driven insights to accelerate the lending process.
A public benefit challenger bank dedicated to bringing financial empowerment to African-American and Latino communities, Paybby offers a financial wellness and PFM app – Wicket – courtesy of its recent acquisition of the eponymous Overland Park, Kansas-based neobank. Wicket provides a Mastercard debit card and FDIC-insured savings and checking accounts, as well as early direct deposit and automatic savings solutions.
Founded in 1948, Carver Federal Savings Bank is one of the largest African-American banks in the U.S. Headquartered in Harlem, New York, the bank has been designated as a Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI) by the U.S. Treasury Department for its community-based banking operations. Carver Federal Savings Bank is committed to reinvesting 80 cents of every dollar deposited back into the African American community.
It’s just a little business banking between friends for now. But the announcement this week that SME payments platform Square is launching an in-house bank is the latest instance of fintechs leveraging banking services to maximize customer engagement and grow their customer base.
Square Financial Services, based in Salt Lake City, Utah, began operations at the beginning of the week, and will function as an independently governed subsidiary of Square offering business loans and deposit products for its merchant sellers. Previously leveraging a partnership with a third-party bank to offer financing via its Square Capital solution, the new “industrial bank” will now provide underwriting and loan origination for the company’s lending product.
According to Square, its Square Capital division facilitated 57,000 loans in Q4 of 2020 and facilitated $857 million in Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans to 80,000+ SMEs. Additionally, 58% of Square Capital’s loans go to women-owned businesses, with 35% going to ethnic minority-owned firms. These figures compare favorably to those of traditional lenders, whose financing tends to support female-owned SMEs 17% of the time and minority-owned companies 27% of the time.
“Bringing banking capability in-house enables us to operate more nimbly, which will serve Square and our customers as we continue the work to create financial tools that serve the underserved,” Square Chief Financial Officer Amrita Ahuja said. Ahuja, who is also Executive Chairwoman of the board of directors for Square Financial Services, added, “We thank the FDIC and Utah DFI for their partnership enabling us to reach this milestone, and look forward to continuing to expand access to financial services at this critical time for small businesses.”
Square Financial Services won charter approval with both the FDIC and the Utah Department of Financial Institutions. The entity will be led by CEO Lewis Goodwin, with Brandon Soto serving as Chief Financial Officer and Samantha Ku as Chief Operating Officer.
From its role as a digital currency innovator to its controversial, politics-free workplace stance, Coinbase continues to be one of fintech’s most compelling stories. And with the company moving ever closer toward a becoming a publicly-traded firm, attention on the San Francisco, California-based digital currency exchange only has intensified.
There may be no better example of this dynamic than an article published on Bloomberg.com this week headlined “Coinbase Is a $100 Billion Crypto Cult.” The author, Jared Dillian, is an investment strategist who wastes little time in letting readers know where he stands on a platform that “has frequent service outages, nonexistent customer service, and sky-high transaction costs.”
Nevertheless, as Dillian acknowledges, there are precious few alternatives for individual cryptocurrency investors. Moreover, much of his dissatisfaction seems to stem from an unfavorable comparison between Coinbase and discount stock brokerages – which have very different histories as well as very different ways of generating revenue.
As for the cult reference, that too has less to do with Coinbase and more to do with the author’s take on the contemporary enthusiasm/mania for cryptocurrencies. If you believe that investment in Bitcoin and other digital assets “has crossed over into religion territory” and represents “an investment cult,” then it is understandable to be critical of an institution that facilitates the behavior. But that, as Dillian indicates, is akin to blaming the store for selling picks and shovels to the gold miners.
What is Coinbase eight and a half years after its launch in 2012 (and six and a half after its Finovate debut)? Will its going public mark the beginning of a new era in digital asset adoption by institutions and individuals? Or, as has been the case in the past, will the news signal, if not an end, then at least a pause in what has been a surge in interest in cryptocurrencies since the spring of 2020?
Here’s what we know: Coinbase has filed with the SEC to go public by way of a direct listing, selling shares directly to the public rather than via a traditional IPO. The company will trade on the Nasdaq under the ticker COIN. In terms of the company’s current valuation, at its most recent funding in 2018, Coinbase was valued at $8 billion. More recently, Axios has reported that Coinbase was valued at $100 billion when it sold shares on the Nasdaq Private Market earlier this year.
Coinbase currently has 43 million verified users (up from 12,000 in 2012). The company has a lifetime trading volume of $456 million and currently has more than $90 billion in assets on its platform. In fiscal 2020, the company experienced trading volume of $38 billion more than double that of fiscal 2018. And perhaps most critically, Coinbase has begun to secure the kind of institutional support that both the company and the cryptocurrencies it manages need. The company reported having 7,000 institutional customers as of the end of 2020, a seven-fold increase over 2017. Revenue growth also has been strong for Coinbase, with the company achieving revenues $1.3 billion in fiscal 2020 compared to $533.7 million in fiscal 2019.
What does this mean for a publicly-traded entity? The best case for $COIN may rest in its ability to serve as a safer haven for crypto-curious investors who do not have the interest in analyzing – or even deeply understanding – individual digital assets. Coinbase could find itself serving a role, in the near-term, that might otherwise be played by a Bitcoin or cryptocurrency exchange-traded fund. And if we are still in the early days of the Digital Asset Age, that may not be a bad place to be.
First Boulevard, a challenger bank dedicated to serving the African American community, announced a $5 million seed funding round this week. Participating in the investment were Barclays, Anthemis, and a number of angel investors including actress Gabrielle Union and AutoZone CFO Jamere Jackson. Donald Hawkins, CEO and co-founder of the Overland, Kansas-based neobank, said that the funding would help First Boulevard build out its business marketplace of black-owned SMEs for its Cash Back for Buying Black program.
The capital will also enable the company to grow its team, its customer base, and its platform. Co-founded last August by Hawkins and COO Asya Bradley during the George Floyd/anti-racism protests of 2020, First Boulevard anticipates launching in Q3 of 2021. Among the neobank’s initial offerings will be a no-fee debit card, solutions to automate savings and wealth-building, as well as financial education resources.
As we noted last month in our Black History Month look at African-American based digital banks, the fledgling challenger bank already has forged an innovative partnership with Visa. First Boulevard will pilot a new suite of Visa’s crypto APIs that enable the trading and custody of digital assets.
“The First Boulevard mission is to help Black America build wealth,” Hawkins said last month when the initiative was announced. “We are thrilled to partner with the leader in digital payments, Visa, and leverage their crypto APIs to provide another channel for the Black community to access crypto as a new asset class that can help build Black wealth.”
First Boulevard’s participation in the cryptocurrency project is a reminder of the growing intersection between the African American community and digital assets. A growing number of black observers of and participants in the cryptocurrency space have advocated Bitcoin and other digital assets as a way for African Americans to achieve independence from a financial structure many believe is systemically stacked against them.
