Given that I’m the only person who reads this blog, I considered it a compliment that Roy and Bertrand Sosa asked me not to write about their new yogurt shop — erggg, I mean, their new financial services flagship for the underbanked — until it was official.  I read about it in the American Banker this morning, so I guess I’m a free man once again.

First, I’d like to express my disappointment that they do not, in fact, serve yogurt at this store.  Seriously.  I think that the Sosa’s are really onto something here, but I think that crossing into a non-financial category, as the brand name and look suggests, could really make for a new paradigm in neighborhood finance.  Mango is to check cashing what WaMu or Umpqua is to banking: new, fresh thinking about creating a welcoming place to be.  Serving yogurt, however, could be as transformative as what Starbucks did to coffee or Barnes and Noble did to libraries.   These are places to come, meet, learn and experience the product in a new way.   So I mean yogurt mostly as a metaphor, but you get the idea.

I was a bit skeptical that the “Apple Store for underbanked” could be alienating to its customers – and it might turn out to be.  But after visiting the store in Austin a month or so ago, I was quite impressed.  Really impressed, actually.

Here’s why: Aspiration and Trajectory.  The Sosa’s have realized for years that aspiration is a key driver to success.  At NetSpend, the aspirational quality of having a Visa card was quite clear.  Mango is a much nicer place than any place I do get financial services.  Doing business there could leap-frog an unbanked customer from cash right past the check casher, right past the bank, right into StarBucks, Pinkberry and WholeFoods.

And the product suite under the hood offers a trajectory to the future.  The store is based around the GPR card.  The only place you can get cash is at the ATM right outside.  This allows doing away with a lot of conventional security measures.  Incoming cash goes right into a lockbox that employees can’t access, either.  You “cash” your check right onto a card.  You can send remittances with cash or from your card.  You can move money from card to card (and soon to phone) from one of the terminals in the store.   Mango offers a suite of cash related products that offer instant liquidity – without cash.