BNY’s Sumday.com homepage
Last week, the Internet discovered an interesting new savings site called Sumday (note 1). It has responsive design, a cute intro video, and social media integration. But it also has something that few trendy fintech plays have, a $230 billion dollar parent, BNY Mellon.
I’ve published something like 2 million words about retail banking and technology and this may be the first time “BNY Mellon” (or Bank of New York) has appeared. Not because they aren’t a good company, but its specialities, corporate banking and uber-wealth management, rarely fit our editorial coverage.
But surprisingly, BNY is bankrolling Sumday, a site encouraging beginners to start investing with “as little as $1.00.” That’s about 6 zeros to the left of the decimal point from where the typical BNY Mellon client usually starts with. All money collected through Sumday is invested in the Dreyfus Basic S&P 500 Stock Index Fund, according to the prospectus accessible in the fine print (the fund is low-cost index offering charging just 20 basis points annually in fees).
One distinguishing feature of the service, you can automatically add a preset amount of cash whenever you use hashtag #sumday on a tweet. That’s a novel feature, but it’s unlikely to get much usage (e.g. most people don’t want to use precious characters to add a misspelled hashtag to their snarky missives). Still, it’s a nice addition to a platform clearly targeting youth.
Other than that, there is little detail spelled out on the site. It is in closed beta and soliciting email addresses for the waiting list.
Apparently the project is a collaboration with IBM given that the only person on the LinkedIn listing provided by Sumday is a consultant with IBM Interactive Labs.