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Hi all, Julie here. Hope everyone had a great week! Over your weekend break, you should take a sec to check out our latest Fintech Today YouTube video: The Story of Coinbase! As the company gets ready to go public, and Bitcoin soars past $55K, this is a must watch. Let us know your thoughts :)

HMBradley's New Round and Joint Accounts

If you asked the question of whether or not the world needed another challenger bank, well apparently it did. One year after its launch, HMBradley has surpassed $175M in customer deposits, just closed a new round of funding, and is launching joint checking accounts. The challenger bank has a gamified approach to its checking accounts, where the customer’s interest rate is based off of the percent of deposits they saved in the most recent quarter. For example, if someone saves 20% or more of their deposits, they will receive a 3% interest rate. The same will be true for the joint accounts.

Full disclosure: I’ve used the HMBradley checking account for a few months now, and opened a joint account with the startup this week.

Varo's NBA Star

Speaking of challenger banks, Varo just announced a strategic investment led by NBA All-Star Russell Westbrook. Westbrook will join as an advisor, where he will help with the future direction of Varo's impact programs. I did have to laugh at this line in the press release though, since thankfully Varo is not the only digital bank focused on minorities:

Marqeta Gets Into Consumer Credit Cards

Soon to be public company Marqeta is expanding into the consumer credit card space to help other brands launch credit card programs. The startup, which offers tools for financial services platforms to provide cards, wallets and other payment mechanisms, announced the expansion just days after a rumored IPO filing. Marqeta is partnering with Deserve on its new credit card initiative. Deserve’s technology and open API platform will power the back end of the program, dealing with management, card origination, underwriting and more.

Some of Marqeta’s larger customers include Cash App, Affirm, DoorDash, and Instacart. At the end of 2020, Marqeta said it had issued 270M cards through its platform. The value of the IPO is expected to be around $10B, according to Reuters.

Brex Goes For An ILC

According to an announcement this week Brex, the corporate credit card startup, has submitted an application with the FDIC and the Utah Department of Financial Institutions to establish Brex Bank. Along with raising loads of funding and seeing its valuation soar in its early days, Brex now has thousands of businesses using its platform (including Fintech Today). Yet, without getting to look at Brex’s financials, people I’ve talked to have had a hard time figuring out how Brex’s business model becomes highly profitable. However, being able to offer more services and do so in house as a bank could change some of these dynamics. Even the proposed bank’s new CEO, Bruce Wallace, told American Banker that having an industrial bank charter would “improve our profitability in the future by being able to provide credit solutions, in addition to what we provide today.” And in an interesting twist, Wallace previously served as Chief Operations Officer, Chief Digital Officer and Head of Global Services of Silicon Valley Bank.

Wallace added that “the primary purpose of pursuing the bank license is to be able to offer financing solutions to” small and midsize business clients. “Without having a banking license, it is far more challenging to do that.”

Congrats to FTT Community member Julianna Lamb on Stytch’s new Series A funding round!

Speaking of badass females, veteran female venture capitalists Addie Lerner and Tali Vogelstein have closed a debut fund for Avid Ventures. The $68M fund will focus on Series A and B stage companies who are building transformative technology companies. Avid has already made Pre-Series A, Series A, and Series B round investments in Staircase, NAVA, Nova Credit, The Wing, and Alloy. Hat tip to Avid for 3 of these 5 companies having female founders. On top of that, 75% of Avid's capital is from philanthropic organizations/foundations and of the 50 strategic individual LPs in the fund, 40% (20) are women. We love to see it.

Announcement! Due to overwhelming demand, Fintech Today has decided to launch a sponsorship program for our Career Corner. If you are hiring and looking to meet high quality candidates, send an email to jordan@fintechtoday.co for more information.

Julie VerHage-Greenberg is the co-founder of Fintech Today, where she focuses on editorial content and brand. Prior to joining, she was Bloomberg’s first fintech reporter, covering Robinhood from before it was a billion dollar company, breaking the news that Plaid was acquiring Quovo, and interviewing executives on Bloomberg TV and at several large conferences.

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