The New York Times ran an interesting story in the Business Section this weekend, titled, “First Make Money; Also Do Good.” Basically, it argues that corporate philanthropy is small potatoes and corporate social responsibility not much more than disingenuous marketing (“hypocritical window-dressing” according to Milton Friedman). Citing Harvard’s Michael Porter’s…
CUB Index YOY Beats S&P 500 by 24%
I’ve been tracking publicly traded underbanked companies for several years. I’m dubbing this index the Core UnderBanked (CUB) Index. It includes the Greendots, the Western Unions, the Cash Americas, the MetaBanks, and Rent-A-Centers of our industry. Market caps vary from $10million to $10billion. I’ve excluded retail banks, like BofA and…
Dynamic Accounts
Why is it that my search engine can anticipate what I’m going to search for after just a couple keystrokes, my music player can string together 1000 songs based on a couple preferences, and my car can adjust whether I like to go through a turn in second gear, but…
Don’t bank the underbanked
The natural implication of the term “unbanked” or “underbanked” is the absence or underutilization of a bank. The assumption is that un- or underbanked people should become banked. While this will be true for some, I believe that a majority of the 60 million underbanked people in the US will…
Goals, Inc
When thinking about how to improve the lives of the underbanked, many gravitate towards financial literacy. Sadly, most of it has proven ineffective. Others seek to make policy and regulatory changes. While this can yield meaningful scalable impact, there are often unintended consequences in our niche (e.g. capping interest rates…
The ol’ “Money In” Problem
Jack Dorsey just raised $100 million at a valuation of $1 billion for his new startup, Square, which allows smart phones to act as merchant credit card swipers. Western Union charges a pretty dime to accept cash and move it elsewhere. Green Dot’s reload network accounts for roughly one third of its…
Amex Enters Prepaid
“Loaded with Benefits. Not Fees” their online ads read. The bank and card network, which traditionally serves higher net worth and business clients, is moving downstream to reach to the underbanked mass market, they say, by introducing a general purpose reloadable prepaid card (GPR, in the jargon) last week. It’s…
And the Winner is…. GoalMine
Over 600 underbanked missionaries, mercenaries, bankers, regulators, entrepreneurs, investors CEOs and middle-managers descended upon New Orleans last week. Together, they represent the single most qualified and discriminating judge of what is hot and what is not in our sector. After watching live demonstrations and Twitter-guided Q&A with the finalists in our Core Underbanked…
Short-term loans you can TRUST
A couple weeks ago, I launched my one-man campaign to eradicate APR when it comes to short-term lending and proposed we replace it with TRUST. APR is bad because actually it doesn’t help the consumer, it provokes anger which informs regulations which causes the unintended consequences of even less availability…
Best Underbanked Forum Ever
The above is a synthesis of CFSI’s conference based on Twitter posts over the past couple days. Not nearly as amazing as the event, but a couple things strike me: “great” is the only very frequent word that’s not a basic descriptor of the event (like conference, consumer, financial). “CFPB”…