The Sosa Brothers drive me nuts!  Mostly because I’m jealous. Really.  They are visionary, they are charismatic, they’re successful, they are creative, they live in Austin, they have the word “Lab” in their company name, and they are committed to improving the lives of millions of people who have less financial freedom.  Roy’s LinkedIn profile reads, “social capitalist.”

So, a couple years ago, Roy and Betrand hooked up with a smart young stock picker and Peace Corps volunteer, Rimmy Malhotra, and convinced him and his side-kick, Yaron, to figure out how to create an investment solution for the underbanked.  After a couple months they popped up with some key insights that became GoalMine (a product of Gratio, a subsidiary of the Sosa’s mPower Labs) which was featured in full technicolor in the American Banker yesterday:

• Goals help people save. So on GoalMine you save for a vacation or a baby, never just to save.
• Cashflow matters. GoalMine allows for many teeny deposits, as small as $25.  Try opening an account at Schwab or Vanguard for ten times that.
• Investing is intimidating.  Rather than 1000s of options, you can pick “saving” or “investing.”  Super simple.
• Location Location Location.  Neither the Fidelity website nor its stores particularly welcome the underbanked, so one of GoalMine’s real innovations is to sell a security on a J-hook, as a giftcard, to be sold at your local grocery store, right next to the iTunes and StarBucks cards. (Although today you can only do it online).

It is a tour de force of good ideas, all packed into one, colorful product.  The company faces some real challenges if it wants to become the E*Trade for the Rest-of-Us: collecting enough customers to make the management fees pay off; staving off advocates once someone loses their assets in a market dip; getting just the right sales pitch; securing some of the coveted space in gift-card racks; making the assets sticky enough to exceed acquisition costs, for starters.

That said, I’m a user, I have a GoalMine account and a goal and I’m even making progress.  Wanna contribute? Click here and call it research.

So what’s next Sosas?  A bank?