Transcript
Hi, welcome to Money Isn’t Everything. I’m Mary Wisniewski, the host of the show and editor-at-large at Cornerstone Advisors.
This is a show that explores early-stage ideas that could, if not already, shake up financial services.
Today on the show is Lorren Pereira, who is the CEO and founder of GiveCard.
We get into a wide range of things, including what it’s like to create a fintech brand with a magical kingdom as part of the design, how to get money to people during crises, and a purchase that, let’s just say, surprised him.
Here’s our conversation.
Lorren, welcome to Money Isn’t Everything.
It’s so wonderful to have you on the show today.
Thanks, Mary.
Likewise.
Great to be here.
Yeah.
Well, we have a lot to talk about, but I think as a starting point, I’m going to start with the broader topic because it’s been said so many times over the years, checks are going away.
Checks are going away.
But this plotline at least got a little bit more action this year with the government saying it’s phasing out checks come fall.
So let’s start there.
Are you feeling that?
Are you feeling companies being like, uh-oh, what do I do?
Yeah, let’s start there.
No, I mean, absolutely.
I think the problem, or part of the problem with checks and why they hadn’t gone away for so long, is that a lot of the burden is on the recipient and not the check writer, at least when it comes to the way it was compared to other solutions.
An example is, if you were writing 1,000 checks to 1,000 people, your alternative would be to send 1,000 ACH transfers to 1,000 people.
But with most of the tools that existed, it was as manual to send 1,000 checks as it was to send 1,000 ACHs.
Maybe there is that physical component, but there are plenty of online tools like Deluxe and Checkbook that actually send a paper check for you.
But it was this idea of repeatedly doing an action a ton of times, collecting recipient information, whether it’s an address for a check or an account number for an ACH.
So really, the problem is they were equally as clunky.
But for recipients, a card, which is obviously a lot of what we do, is significantly better because, one, you don’t have to deal with cashing the check.
Two, if you’re unbanked or underbanked, you end up paying up to 10% of that check in terms of fees at predatory lenders or check-cashing facilities.
We understood why things hadn’t moved forward, and it’s largely just like the status quo was bad, but what else was there wasn’t significantly better or easier.
I think this year we’ve definitely seen the momentum in that people are being forced to move.
But it is interesting in that people are being forced to move.
We’re not really seeing people go, “Huh, the federal government is saying that they’re phasing out checks by September. Maybe checks are terrible and we should change.”
It’s really just, “Oh, well, I guess we have to change it now.”
What’s been interesting with GiveCard is so much of what we do is workflows.
It’s saying, “Hey, you don’t have to do 1,000 actions 1,000 times. We’re going to integrate directly with your Salesforce, pull the 5,000 people that you’re serving this month, pull an address from all of those Salesforce records, automatically ship out 5,000 cards to them, and have it top up with $300 every month,” or whatever it might need to be.
That’s that next-level workflow that makes it fundamentally important to move to modern technology and payouts.
But it took more than just saying, “Hey, you could send a card instead of a check,” because again, the burden was the same up until products like ours really stepped in.
I want to talk about your product because I was, maybe it was another podcast, I can’t remember now, but you were giving the backstory.
I think it was like you wanted to give a homeless person money and didn’t have physical cash on you.
That was a moment that shined, oh, something needs to be done here.
That was the start of your aha moment.
Is that right?
You’re exactly right.
Yeah.
I was out to dinner with my roommate and came across someone after dinner who was really nice, just needed some money for an extra jacket, and I didn’t have $30 on me to help him out.
I didn’t have any cash for me to help him out.
It was this thought of, wow, I wish he had some sort of card.
I wish I could just, from my phone, send money to that card.
That would be great.
I started to look into, just in general, not just that idea, but how do organizations get money to people, especially when that individual is unbanked, but not always when they’re unbanked, but especially in that case.
I started to look into how nonprofits give out gift cards and how governments give out benefits and found out that a ton of this is high fee and super manual.
When nonprofits give out 50,000 Walmart $20 gift cards a month, they’re buying 50,000 $20 gift cards from Walmart, keeping them in a back office, and handing them out physically.
It’s this idea, and I won’t name the nonprofit, but I was talking with a director for a Boston nonprofit who told me they’ve been giving out Walmart gift cards for 10 years, and a lot of them.
I said, “Hey, I lived in Boston. There’s no Walmart downtown.”
She paused for a second and she said, “You’re right. There isn’t.”
And there isn’t.
There’s no Walmart in downtown Boston.
It’s this idea that what exists, it might work, but it’s not great for that recipient.
Really what GiveCard’s product came to do is say, can we make it really, really, really easy to give a lot of money to a lot of people, where it’s simple for the organization giving it out?
That’ll actually bring about system change, and it’s immensely beneficial to the end recipient.
It’s not like cashing a check or trying to use a $20 Walmart gift card.
We do prepaid cards.
Right now, we just announced a partnership with Visa, so now they’re with Visa.
Essentially, prepaid cards that are super high limit.
You can load up to $10,000 a month onto these cards.
So we see some organizations giving people serious amounts.
These cards work essentially anywhere Visa is accepted.
We built in a ton of tooling around this understanding that a lot of the people that have received our cards, this is their first true financial product.
We have exceptional, I love our cardholder support team so much, exceptional trauma-informed cardholder support.
Really, really good tools and things that understand the type of use we have.
Our app has 27 different languages.
Our support team has live interpreter services for all of these languages.
Our app doesn’t require activation if you don’t need it because someone might not have internet.
We never assume you have internet with anything.
We have physical locations and terminals where you can check your balance without having to have internet.
You can go to a local library in El Monte, California, and check your balance instead of having to go online or anything like that.
So really, our product is, this is so cheesy, but you’ve seen our branding, how do we make money movement magical for the sender or an organization giving money to people?
How do we take away all of the administration and burden from that process?
And for the recipient, how do we make this feel like the greatest financial product you’ve ever used?
How do we make this as good as some people would look at their Chase Sapphire or their Amex?
I want to talk about the recipients because certainly some of them are the ones in an emergency.
So the speed of funds is especially critical.
Let’s talk about different organizations you’ve worked with to date.
Tell me about especially, oh, this is serving an emergency need.
I think the most recent example is the LA wildfires.
So in the last three months, we’ve given a lot of money out, in the tens of millions of dollars, in both LA and North Carolina.
LA for the fires, North Carolina for the hurricanes.
The LA fire was obviously very interesting because it wasn’t forecast.
The North Carolina hurricanes were forecast.
With LA, the fires began and they spread, and there was no real ability to prepare.
What surprised me when we entered into the disaster relief space as a company is that there was a high degree of preparedness and forecasting of a lot of things.
People know which vendors they’re going to use to give money out six months before hurricane season even begins.
But with the fires, no one was prepared.
So it was quite a large scramble to figure out not just, how do we get what to people, but who do we serve?
How do you even find the people in need when everyone’s fleeing their homes and there’s a bunch of misinformation?
No one really knows what is an affected area versus what is not.
Was Silver Lake affected versus Pasadena?
It was really challenging in such tight timelines.
We, being an infrastructure company, work with companies that give out the money.
So we had more than nine different customers that did fire relief through us in LA.
But the one I’d like to highlight is GiveDirectly.
Incredible nonprofit, all about how do we get money to people as efficiently as possible.
They reached out to us.
We kind of had a warm relationship with them, but never worked with them.
They reached out saying, “Hey, we need to get money to a couple thousand people in LA. We know the ZIP codes. We know how to target them, but getting the actual money in their hands is extremely challenging because their homes are no longer around. We don’t have physical locations.”
GiveCard is obviously, you know, we have hundreds of thousands of cards out there.
We figured this out in different places.
They kind of pegged us to solve that last-mile situation.
So how it worked is, if you were in LA and you had a food stamps app, Propel was the app, we could reasonably assume that anyone on food stamps was below a certain amount of income because that validation is done.
So we said, if you were on an EBT app like Propel and your registered ZIP code was one that, using satellite data, GiveDirectly decided was affected largely by the fires, you get a push notification saying, “Hey, you’re eligible for $3,500 immediate assistance that you can claim right now. We just need you to fill out this form right here within the Propel app.”
It’s a trusted app.
Individuals have the app.
They click on it.
A lot of people are like, “I do not believe this is going to work.”
I was just about to ask you, does that create the moment of, like, it’s almost unbelievable?
Like, what scam is this?
Right.
Yeah.
That was my concern too.
What’s crazy is we didn’t just ship out cards, which when you see that push notification, it said, “How do you want to be paid?”
You could choose physical card, virtual card, and bank account, like bank transfer.
Physical card and virtual card, even if it was a scam, maybe I’d put in my email address.
Maybe I’d give someone my physical address.
I’m not that concerned about that.
With bank transfer, we had people literally log into their bank account or give us their account and routing numbers so we could verify the account was open.
That level of trust, we were like, will people even do this?
But this is a product we’d had live before.
We call it GiveCard Intake.
We knew that people typically do, even with no relationship with us.
We had north of 96% completion on this.
So it wasn’t even like...
So it’s the need.
The need is eroding the, ooh, is this safe?
Yeah.
The need, and then also the trusted partner.
They’re not filling this out from a random cold email they’re getting from nobody.
They’re getting this prompt within an app that they’ve been using before, that they use to check their benefits.
A lot of the communication, and that’s what our team is really good at, GiveDirectly has people for that, Propel had people for that.
We all kind of came together and said, how do you talk to people to build trust?
We did a lot of design.
I think we spent a good week and a half on just, how do we communicate each of these pieces?
But we had to move quickly.
Then we got the money out to people.
They said virtual card, they click virtual card.
Within a couple seconds, even, they got an email from us saying, “Hey, click here. We’ll add this to your Apple Wallet.”
Now it’s in their Apple Wallet.
They can then go use it.
If you select physical card, you could choose where you want it sent.
Obviously, people’s homes weren’t around, and so you could send it to a family member or a friend’s house or to a general trusted location.
Or I think there were pickup zones as well.
This wasn’t GiveDirectly, but from a different customer who said, “We’ve got a backstock of 3,000 GiveCards in this nonprofit’s office. If you want a physical card, you can just go pick it up right there. You don’t need a mailing address.”
So we were essentially, within a few seconds to minutes, able to get a lot of people millions of dollars, which is really, really cool.
I mean, that’s why we exist.
I actually live in LA, so I had to leave just for a night.
Friends and friends are suffering from this.
But it is like the moment where you look back later and you think, oh, I did not bring everything I needed to bring in case it was an extended moment.
I just can’t even imagine.
You need to get food.
If you don’t have the money to do that right then and there, that’s such a profound problem.
We put out a survey, obviously optional, and say, if you want to tell the story of how you used the money, we’d love to hear it.
They actually managed to use that to raise even more money now, so we’re giving out even more because obviously recovery is so long term.
But one of the stories was really fascinating.
First, the line was saying, “30 years gone in 30 minutes,” which is terrifying to hear.
But how they said they used the money is, now they’re staying, they first used it to get a hotel.
They have kids, to have a place to stay for a week.
Then they managed to find friends and family they could stay with.
But the mom still has to take their kids to school and work, and now she’s an hour further away from where she works than where she used to be.
So she uses it to pay for gas and for the family that they’re staying with.
This is actually such a big thing to complement the groceries.
Obviously, you don’t want to be a burden where you stay.
We actually found this in a study we did a long time ago with youth homelessness.
When people crash on someone else’s couch, one of the biggest determinants to how long they can crash there is, are they able to contribute to the groceries in any way?
Because if they are, people, you know, you can let someone stay for a few weeks, you might be fine.
But if someone’s staying with you for seven months, at a certain point, you might be like, “Hey, I can’t afford to do this.”
Because if someone’s even contributing $100 a month to their own groceries and staying in your house, you’re more likely to house them for significantly longer.
That’s something one of our customers found many years ago now.
We found that to be true with LA too, which is really cool.
Wow.
Yeah, that is really interesting because you are relying, maybe you need clothes from them too.
You’re just in a very vulnerable position.
That opens up the bigger conversation because I don’t know if I want to do it pre-pandemic and post, but I sort of do.
There’s always been this sort of debate, especially in the U.S., like what happens if you just give people money?
Will they use it right?
It seems to be the worry a lot of, I will call them elitists, might experience.
But I’m kind of curious if that is something you observed.
Do you think the conversation moved after the pandemic and all the stimulus money?
Did it help change the...
Yeah, you’re nodding your head.
So I...
Yeah.
I mean, for sure.
You’re exactly on.
GiveCard has gotten significantly bigger afterwards.
We’ve been around since 2018.
We were around pre-pandemic.
We’re very much in the just-give-people-money space for a long time.
I was speaking at a lot of guaranteed income conferences.
It’s something I do believe is really important, to have a social safety net like that.
Especially, I don’t want to get on the whole AI train, especially as AI makes some jobs permanently irreplaceable.
There’s no way certain categories will ever be able to reskill, at least foreseeably, to be able to find income.
I think it’s going to be really, really necessary as a supplemental income or a total income.
But on the pandemic, I think more than the stimulus, because admittedly the stimulus might not have been the greatest driver of public confidence in just giving people money, because a lot of people spent their stimulus on silly things.
That’s actually something a lot of people bring up to me.
“Oh well, I spent my stimulus on a lawn mower and I didn’t need a lawn mower.”
It’s like, oh, if you spent your stimulus on a lawn mower, you probably didn’t need stimulus.
That is a curious thing.
If you got a lawn mower but don’t need one, I guess save it for a backyard at a later time.
I think for me, what I’ve seen change the most is a lot of nonprofits and service-based organizations, because these are the ones that we’re seeing a lot of GiveCard customers.
We have more than 200 nonprofits using us to give people money.
Most of them were not doing that before the pandemic.
If you’re a soup kitchen, you used to serve soup and warm meals.
But then when the pandemic happens, you can’t have a physical location, but you’ve still got money.
You’re still funded by your donors, at least you have some.
You still want to serve people.
So what did they do?
They gave everyone a Chipotle gift card or whatever it might be.
Then now they find, oh wait, we can actually, with $15, now Chipotle is super expensive, with $15 you can actually feed someone, whereas it cost the soup kitchen $20 before to serve someone else.
So maybe they decide, hey, the most effective we could be is a community space, but we give people money instead of doing the whole cooking side of things, the supply chain logistics of that.
We’ve seen that across the board in many types of organizations.
Organizations that help people adjust after the justice system might give someone a stipend now to kind of help them adjust until they find employment.
They find that that’s way more effective than some of the workshops that they’re running instead.
So what we’re just seeing is, across the board, organizations that were forced to give people money in COVID, or pseudo-money, things like gift cards, because they couldn’t do in-person services, are now realizing that those were more effective.
Not necessarily to replace everything they did because I do think some of the things these nonprofits did were intrinsically valuable for communities, but as a supplement.
That’s really what COVID shifted.
It’s this realization of, wow.
In terms of do people misuse the cash, one, I’m just a general believer that people know what they need and people will put things to what they need.
I can’t speak to our customers’ data.
I obviously get the privileged view to see how each customer’s cards are being used at a high level.
Some of our customers have published this data.
I think one of my favorite examples is El Monte, California.
The city did a cash assistance program to vulnerable individuals, formerly homeless mothers, I believe it was.
After running their program for a year, they published the data and they actually used a GiveCard report to say this is how the money is being spent.
It was mostly on food and transportation and childcare.
We see this on the literal card statements.
This isn’t something someone self-reported.
They used that data to get an extension on the program and more funding to now serve a broader category of people, including veterans, which was really, really interesting because the data is there.
We see it.
We’re a card company.
It’s not something that can be made up.
Yeah.
It’s interesting in that thought because my last guest founded a neobank for the formerly incarcerated, and it’s made a pivot, but he was privy to some of the transactions of those recently released from prison.
But he also cast question marks around some people’s questions on transactions.
One example was someone bought $200 sneakers.
You could judge that, but then the reality was a little bit messier because he bought those to try to get back with, I think it was his niece, but like, in a strained relationship.
So it was a purchase to try to mend a relationship.
It’s like even if you get all the data, you don’t always know the stories.
Who knows really, unless you find out, right?
Yeah.
Our favorite story was in 2019.
No, 2018.
Between 2018 to 2019, 2020, we’d really struggled to find any way to actually give the money out.
Cards are very hard, and we’d have to build a ton of infrastructure to actually make what we did possible.
Especially, I mean, back then, nowadays people kind of understand how much money nonprofits move.
Back then, this idea of, oh, we’re going to build a social impact card issuer, people would be like, who are you?
What are you talking about?
It was hard getting anyone behind the idea.
I remember after a good two years of working at it, we’d finally raised enough money and built the infrastructure to give out our first card.
It was in downtown Boston.
I gave it to someone.
I said, “Here you go. It’s yours. Feel free to just use it.”
I think I gave him $750 on that card.
Immediately, he told me, “I know how I’m going to spend it.”
I’m so excited.
Go, yes.
Two years of work.
I’m going to hear it.
How are you going to spend it?
He goes, “I’m going to Party City and I’m going to buy a leprechaun costume.”
My face dropped.
I was like, “Are you kidding me?”
I turned to Anna, who still works here however many years later now, one of our lead engineers, like, “Did you hear what I heard?”
Before I could comment on it and turn back, I was so judgmental in that moment.
I turn back to him, he goes, “This is going to mean so much to me. I’m Irish. I’ve been homeless 15 years. I’ve never been able to participate in the St. Patrick’s Day parade in Boston, and this year I’m going to get to.”
It was like that had to happen.
That had to be the first card to remind me, to exactly your point, you have no idea the stories behind these things.
That obviously meant more than a burger probably would have.
I probably would have been intrinsically happier if I heard burger at first.
But it’s so interesting.
Yeah.
Because that was a dream in his heart.
The moment you can execute on it.
Yeah.
But wow, what a surprise for you.
I can imagine the facial reaction.
I’d be like, wait a minute.
I thought I was changing the world, right?
Yeah.
One leprechaun suit at a time, I guess.
You know what?
I do like a leprechaun.
So that’s really, really funny.
Well, I want to know more about the journey of building a startup.
I want to make sure I bump up this quote because there’s one segment of the show and it’s “That’s What You Said.”
I actually have two for you.
You know what?
I just queued it up as “That’s What You Said,” but I’m going to bring that one up later because that’s the direct quote I want to use.
I want to explore your advice for entrepreneurs when they are deciding whether to pursue such a thing because I heard you mention somewhere else that you’ve got to figure out how to make it work for one more year if it’s something near and dear to your heart.
I just wanted to explore that idea a bit more.
Yeah.
So this is something I feel very strongly about, and I always tell people I feel more strongly about it than you might.
So please don’t take my advice if you don’t feel this way.
But startups are hard, and they take a long time.
I mean, I’ve been doing this seven years, and I don’t see a horizon for another 10 years.
I think it’s going to get very big.
I do not see an end in sight.
I’m not demotivated by that.
I know a lot of very close friends who run amazing companies who, if they have to run their company two years from now, will quit.
They’re amazing people, and they’ll openly say, maybe not on a podcast or in front of investors, they’ll openly say this.
I think what’s really, really tricky is, you are a human.
At the end of the day, no matter what you’re doing, you’re grinding.
Like with GiveCard, for example, we’re doing such important work.
We’re putting money in people’s hands.
Most of my day is reviewing code, reviewing contracts, talking to infrastructure partners and regulators.
I’m very, very removed from the end cardholder.
I try to make it a point to work support on weekends to stay connected with everyone and our cardholders, but at the end of the day, for most of my job, I’m not really connected to that impact.
What really, really grounds me with things is that big picture, being able to look back and know what we’re doing.
What are we actually doing fundamentally?
We’re putting money in people’s hands where, if we didn’t exist, they would not have received that money in a lot of cases because the infrastructure wasn’t there.
Someone might have tried to send a check, and they might have gone, “Ah, it’s not going to get delivered. Let’s just do something else instead. Let’s do a workshop or something like that.”
I fundamentally believe that putting money in people’s hands makes a huge difference.
That is such a big motivator to me.
It’s not to say that our mission is greater than someone else’s mission.
Whatever it is, just whatever you’re building, make sure you really, really care about it.
I used to, in college, run a pet care app.
I love my dog.
I adore my dog.
But I had an app that was about tracking whether your dog has been walked or fed that day, and it would reset every day.
I would have hated if I still worked on this seven years afterwards.
There’s just the, make sure that whatever you, I think, play with ideas early because you never know what an idea could become.
But when it comes to that decision of, I dropped out of school for this.
I turned down many acquisitions.
We’ve done so many things to say this is what we want to do and we want to do it big ourselves.
We don’t want to put this in someone else’s hands.
We want to drive this ourselves.
When you make that kind of decision, it’s that type of thing.
Make sure it’s something you really, really love because, yeah, you only live once.
So I don’t know.
I’m very, very big on that.
I always tell founders, especially students, when they’re like, “Should I work on this?”
Play with it.
Do it on the side, working at nights and weekends.
When you’re making the really big decision, does this really matter to you?
Do you care that you’re building a car wash CRM, or is this just a way you think you’re going to make a lot of money?
Because at the end of the day, is that really going to fulfill you?
Again, different types of people, different types of drives.
But for me, I love my team.
I love our mission.
I love our customers.
I love our cardholders.
It’s hard to step away even when we have rough days.
Yeah.
It’s important to know what motivates you to decide the course of your life.
We hinted toward this already, but your website, the design, the aesthetic.
I think I saw fairies.
So I think it’s my first, like, I’m enchanted by going to this fintech website.
Tell me about that.
It’s in your background right now.
Yeah, it is.
All you’re seeing in my background is essentially a dragon flying over a valley with a bunch of people riding it.
It says GiveDragon Valley, and then a long description of, “Endemic to western GiveTopia, the friendly GiveDragons helped scores of travelers find their way to the kingdom in exchange for a few cards to snack on.”
Ridiculous, right?
So first of all, our general branding.
We had very boring, plain fintech branding.
I think it was two years ago.
I think we made the change in 2023 to this branding.
Very, very boring branding.
So for five years, very boring branding.
When people were comparing GiveCard to other solutions, even if our product was five or 10 times better, which it really is, honestly, they would think about GiveCard like they think about the other products.
When it came to price, they’d say, “But this company prices this way.”
When it comes to the solutions, they actually wouldn’t think we were able to do more than the others.
We’d actually have to say, “No, no, no. We can do so much more. You don’t even have to think about manually downloading this CSV and doing this. We’ll do it all. It’s all automated.”
We realized this because we looked like a fintech.
People think we’re a fintech.
Our buyers, you know, a lot of our buyers are nonprofits and governments.
This branding was a bit of a risk, but it’s this idea of, if nonprofits and governments typically see very boring gray websites all the time, and they see this random crazy fantasy world where everything is...
The whole thing that joined us, we interviewed most of our customers at that time.
We only had like 30, but we interviewed a lot of our customers.
We said, “Hey, how would you describe GiveCard? What do we actually do for you?”
I think the wording we said is, describe the feeling of using GiveCard.
One of the most common themes is this idea of magic and disbelief.
“Oh, it’s like magic. I uploaded a CSV, money went out to 5,000 people, and then it went straight into my QuickBooks and reconciled. I just saved 10 hours of work today in just one move.”
It was this idea of magic and disbelief.
They were like, wait, what we’re really doing is we’re making this idea of money movement magical for the sender and the recipient.
So we created the fantasy world of GiveTopia, where money moves magically, where there are all these magical creatures, these wonderful kingdoms and everything.
It’s all about a world where you’re not in the, we call it the, what is it, I’m blanking the name, the fintech forest or something like that, where you’re snared in all these canyons.
There are all these hidden fees and compliance burdens and fraud.
This idea of, when you’re in GiveTopia, everything’s just wonderful and super fun.
So we definitely took it very far.
It was such a gamble.
Are we going to lose every government contract we have?
But it really worked.
Some people say, “Oh, you’re the fun vendor.”
Some people, the way they think about GiveCard is like they’ve never seen something like us before.
I’m obviously very sold in on the brand.
There was a long time where my LinkedIn title was Minister of Tourism, Great Kingdom of GiveTopia, instead of CEO at GiveCard.
That’s really funny.
People would be like, “Is this really a cult?”
That was a little too far.
Internally, when we do all-hands meetings, every department has these kind of GiveTopian names.
But the poster you’re seeing is, we themed our office as this Ministry of Tourism.
Every poster is like a travel poster, like “Visit GiveTopia.”
Any LinkedIn post I do ends in that as well, like, “Visit GiveTopia.”
It’s a lot of fun.
We love it.
People feel it, and they have a lot of fun with it.
I mean, it makes a difference, right?
People are so used to being served the worst technology.
Both our customers and the end recipients are getting these terrible store-bought plastic cards that are horrible and don’t work anywhere.
Suddenly, they’re getting this magical branding.
It’s saying, “Welcome to the GiveCard family,” or, “Welcome to GiveTopia.”
It works so well, integrates everywhere, and it’s just this fundamental reality shift.
It’s saying, we’re not building fintech and then finding a way to shoehorn it into this category.
We’re building fintech for this category.
I think that’s being felt, and we want it to be felt in this very mystical way.
Yeah.
No, that’s fun.
I had my first gift card in recent times, so I had been out of date with it.
I tried to pay for something online.
I had to do it twice, and immediately it flagged me for fraud.
I was like, what’s happening?
Then they had to mail me another one immediately because there wasn’t a virtual component.
I was like, oh wow.
This is a different kind of look and feel.
The status quo.
Yeah.
Yeah, it’s crazy.
Anyway, I like what we’ve done.
Well, this brings me back to the quote I was going to say for “That’s What You Said,” and it’s about financial services.
What you said is, “The system was built in the opposite way it should have been.”
At the time, you were talking about built for richer people instead of poorer people.
I think that’s just a really important point to illustrate, and here you are building something in a different category here.
Where do you think we are on the scale?
Because you hear different things.
I’ve covered fintech since 2007.
A lot of people will say, “Hey, fintech has really improved financial services in the sense of there are fewer overdrafts,” or it’s dropped in price, or you can open accounts more where you don’t even need to keep a balance really, whereas before it could be a couple hundred bucks or something like that.
Those are little things that people will recognize as improving financial services.
But how much more improvement do you think we need?
You know, this is something I’ve been thinking about a lot recently.
A few years ago, someone asked me, “Is there any intention on GiveCard creating a consumer bank?”
Because hundreds of thousands of cardholders, we interface with a lot of people that log in with our app weekly and are using this as their main card.
GiveCard is not the number three or number four card in someone’s wallet.
It’s their card.
This is how they’re feeding their families and getting their kids to school and whatever else it is.
This question of, well, beyond that idea of dispersing money, should we be the way someone actually manages their money?
To date, I’ve said no.
We don’t really have that intention.
Largely because, but it’s not because of lack of...
So you’re right.
Overdraft is kind of going away.
Things like Chime have done a very good job.
A fee-free setup, really simple product, pretty decent cardholder support.
They’ve taken away a lot of the sins of big banking as much as they can.
Fee-free ATMs, whatever it needs to be.
The fact that there are still however many tens of millions of unbanked and underbanked Americans, I don’t think is due to lack of access anymore.
I see a Chime ad maybe every day.
I don’t think it’s to do with that.
I think it’s more now to this piece of lack of trust and lack of convenience.
If you’re only making, or if you’re only getting, call it $600 or so even in a month, you’re not going to put that in a bank account because you need to spend it.
So what’s the point?
Also, even if you had a little more money, do you have this trust in these institutions when fintechs are going bankrupt and things like Synapse are causing tens of thousands of people to be without their savings?
There’s this question of, I think it’s just a trust and convenience piece.
At the end of the day, for a lot of people, cash is still better.
At least cash in your pockets isn’t going anywhere unless you lose your pants.
That was a cool quote.
That could happen sometimes.
Very rarely put out wisdom like that.
Anyway, for me, I think that there just needs to be, this is one of the reasons why people bring up maybe GiveCard could be that trusted thing.
We’ve done the convenience, but we’ve done the trust.
I’m not that interested in getting to that.
We have so much more to fix here.
But I think that’s what the banks need to do next.
They can’t just take away fees and say, “Oh, do you trust us now? We’re free.”
At the end of the day, if a product is free, you’re the product, is something I’ve heard before.
It’s this idea of, how can you build that strong trust with people?
How can you make them feel like it’s not just that you’re doing something for them, you’re doing something with them?
You are a product built for them, not you are a product for a bank.
So yeah, that’s what I think they need to start doing.
You brought up something interesting too.
Knowing a bunch of languages, I think that’s really important to building trust too.
What’s your viewpoint on an experience that actually can speak the language of the person?
How important do you think that is to building trust?
Major.
I mean, major.
It’s this piece of comfort, right?
It’s not that our cardholders don’t speak English.
A majority of our cardholders do speak English as their primary language.
But for the remaining 27 languages, it’s not that all of them don’t speak English.
English might not be their primary language.
Money is a primary concern to people.
It’s something that, again, it’s how they’re feeding their kids, getting everyone to school.
It’s very, very important to people.
You should be able to be comfortable when you’re talking about it.
Things happen.
You might go to a grocery store and you thought that you had X amount of dollars and you didn’t, and your card declined.
Now you’re literally in the front of a long line at Walmart and you’re on the phone with our support agents, who are 24/7, still going to pick up immediately, and you’re trying to figure out, why did my card decline?
You don’t want to be having to jump through hoops mentally to understand why that card declined.
You shouldn’t.
That’s why language is so, so critical.
It’s a piece of comfort.
We want you to feel comfortable with your card.
I’ve said this before.
I really want a GiveCard to be something people are proud of.
Our cards, I don’t have one on me, but essentially it’s like the little smiley characters you see on our website that the pixies are rooting out of the ground, like the living card.
Our card is one of those.
It’s got a smiley face on it.
It’s like a person with hands and legs, like one of those card people.
I want it to be not a thing of, “Oh, I’ve received financial support. I must hide this thing,” to, “This is a great card. This is making a difference for me. I don’t care if people see it. This is something that works really well for me.”
I do want to go from a point of fear or insecurity to a point of genuine pride and confidence.
I think some of that will come from making people really comfortable with using it and knowing that whatever situation you’re in, it’ll work.
And when it doesn’t, we’ve got your back.
That’s so big.
Yeah.
The comfort thing.
Comfort is really important.
I have one last question for you, but before I ask it, how should people get in touch with you?
What’s the best way?
Find me on LinkedIn.
Go to GiveCard.com, G-I-V-E-C-A-R-D dot com.
One, not regret, but I hate how similar it sounds to gift card.
If I could go back in time, I would change gift card to present card or something so that GiveCard could be GiveCard.
But I wouldn’t change our name.
I love GiveCard.
At GiveCard.com, there’s a contact form there.
If you want to get in touch with me directly, find me on LinkedIn, Lorren Pereira.
I’m still, you know, still accepting things myself, so be there and I’d love to chat.
Yeah.
Well, wonderful.
We already talked about your poster, so let’s see if this can compete.
But what’s the image on your phone’s lock screen?
Oh, it’s my dog, Peppermint.
Ah, it does compete.
Oh, this changed.
It’s my girlfriend, Izzy.
Absolutely competes.
My girlfriend or my dog, Peppermint.
I guess it rotates.
What a cutie pie.
Well, thanks so much for being on the show today.
It’s been a blast talking to you.
Thanks for joining me.
Oh, thanks, Mary.
This is awesome.
Okay, so one thing that I learned, even if the aid is used to purchase, let’s say, a leprechaun costume, it could still be a really good story.
If you like this episode, give us a rating on whatever podcast platform you wish to, and/or subscribe to the show so you don’t miss an episode.
Coming up next on the show, I’ll be exploring open banking issues and the hot debate that Chase caused, and also lessons learned from the U.K.
Catch you then.
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