The Case for Friction: Rethinking Speed in Banking

Welcome to Money Isn’t Everything. I’m Mary Wisniewski, Cornerstone Advisors editor-at-large and host of the show that explores early-stage ideas that could, if not already, shake up financial services.

And today on the show, we’re talking about a surprising twist on why friction might be a selling point in banking.

I’m speaking with Erik Beguin, the founder and CEO at Austin Capital Bank, which offers an account called Fort Knox.

He makes the case for why the smartest innovation in fintech could involve slowing things down.

And he shares how he’s been defrauded.

Here’s our conversation.

Erik, welcome to Money Isn’t Everything.

It’s wonderful to have you on the show today.

Mary, it’s so nice to be here.

I’m looking forward to our conversation.

Yeah, because we’re talking friction.

And that might not sound like, hey, this is going to be an exciting conversation, but I think it’s exactly going to be a very exciting conversation because it’s flipping the value of what is a selling point for a financial product.

So I hoped we could start there because clearly fraud is only on the way up in financial services.

You launched a product earlier this year where the focus is preventative to fraud, and it’s still kind of a counterintuitive move.

So I guess, Erik, where I want to start is, what was the personal story here that made you think, hey, this is actually a selling point of a product?

Well, the personal story is I was sitting in my office during COVID, and I just saw all these programs coming out that were all designed to get money out into the public, whether it’s PPP or our state benefits or government benefits or any of these things.

I was looking at this like, we’re spinning up all this money.

We’re just going to dump money into the economy to keep it going.

This is going to be just a hotbed of fraud because all these experiences were moving from in-person experiences to digital, and nothing was ready for it.

It was sort of being done on the fly when half the workforce was at home.

So I started thinking about it then.

In fact, I actually looked at the Fort Knox name back then.

I think we trademarked it five years ago.

Wow.

But I really didn’t know what the product would be.

Then I just looked at fraud stats.

I was like, whatever the fraud stats are, they’re going to be understated.

And they’re going to be understated for a host of reasons we can talk about as we keep going today here.

But I really saw that.

And then, ironically, I am a bank CEO, and I have been defrauded myself a couple of times.

Yeah.

A couple of...

Okay.

I have been too, but I am not a bank CEO.

Yeah.

So one time was a traditional Ponzi scheme.

And that’s actually, I think you’re going to ask him about this quote later, so I’ll save the Ponzi scheme story.

I testified in a trial there and actually assisted in that.

That ended up with a person being convicted and put in prison.

But my personal story is I wanted to go to the national championship game.

I went to Michigan, and Michigan was playing Villanova in San Antonio.

I wanted to buy tickets.

This is when a certain P2P service had first come out, and it was really convenient.

It was run by a bunch of big banks.

Being a banker, I was like, oh, well, I might not trust these other services, but this one, they have KYC and BSA and AML and the regulator, and they’re going to know me and they’re going to know who I’m sending the money to.

So if I’m ever defrauded, I’ll just say, hey, that person defrauded me, and they would know who defrauded me.

So I went and I bought tickets, and I transferred them money instantly to get the tickets using this P2P service.

It turns out my tickets were fake.

Then I had to buy another set of tickets to get into the game.

But then when I contacted the financial institution that I used their payment services, they essentially told me that it was my own problem.

If I had read the terms of service, I was not supposed to send money to people I did not know.

That message is now clearly communicated.

But back then, this is five years or more ago, it was not so clearly communicated at that time.

So I’ve been defrauded, and that’s sort of a scam.

And then also, finally, just listening to my mom talk.

My mom is an octogenarian, and she goes to the Y and they play cards.

They had somebody come in and talk about fraud, and the person talking, who’s a police officer, asked everybody, “Who here has lost money to a fraud or scam?”

Over half of her friends raised their hands.

Oh no.

Which sort of corresponds.

The stats are over 50% of fraud victims are over 60 years old.

They have more assets and they’re not as technically savvy at times.

And sometimes they’re lonely and want interaction.

That’s sort of a perfect recipe for disaster with fraudsters.

Yeah.

I am really scared about all that, especially with AI when you think about it posing as someone’s child or something and saying, “I need money right now.”

It’s just a sad state.

So Erik, those were events that helped shape your desire to put a product out there that would be counter to this experience.

Yeah.

The personal stories around fraud and fraud losses, and then I’ve read hundreds, if maybe not thousands, of these, are really devastating, especially for Americans that are older.

When their savings are stolen and they’re older and they don’t have the ability to earn and replace them, it’s a life-changing, sometimes absolutely devastating event that can cause all sorts of really, really bad things to happen.

They can cause massive depression and things associated with that.

So it is a financial story, and it’s a human story as to why I created Fort Knox.

I want to go into some of the product design because there are some very surprising features, but also not surprising considering what you’re trying to solve for.

Highlight some of them and what went into the thinking of, oh yeah, this needs to be here.

Yeah, absolutely.

So Fort Knox is really, if you think about it, it’s a contrarian product.

Yes.

Almost every bank out there wants to have seven products with you and have your whole banking relationship.

And every bank out there, and this includes fintechs, banks, credit unions, I’ll use bank generically, wants to make it more convenient for you to onboard and more convenient for you to move money and move money faster and 24/7, move money anywhere at any time.

The reality is most Americans have two different types of money.

They have the money that they need for their payments for the next 30 to 90 days, and then they have their savings.

These two buckets of money have very, very different needs and uses, and they shouldn’t be held in close proximity to each other.

They certainly shouldn’t have the same convenience of access.

So your checking account, yeah, you need to pay your bills.

You need to transfer P2P payments for the babysitter, whatnot.

But you really should only have enough money in your checking account for what you need in the next 30 or 60 days.

Then you have your savings account.

In this account, it should be easy to get money in and difficult to get money out.

And here you have education, emergency fund, rainy-day fund, buying a new home, buying a vehicle, saving for a vacation, all of these things, saving for the holidays.

There you want an easy way to get money in and a controlled way to get money out.

But most banks are putting these two things next to each other.

They’re really trying to balance convenience and security.

These two things are fundamentally juxtaposed against each other.

The more convenient you make it to move your money, the less secure it is.

The more secure you make your money, the less convenient it is.

So you really need to treat them as two separate things.

At your typical bank, you’ll find these things next to each other.

It’s super easy to transfer the money between the two accounts.

Then on top of it, you have all the different mechanisms for moving your money, whether it’s instant P2P payments, same-day ACH, next-day ACH, wire transfers.

I’ve run these experiments.

I probably have 30 bank accounts.

I’ve done these experiments where I can take an account and I can add a wire transfer service and transfer all of my money out in under about five minutes.

Wow.

I was shocked to learn how easy it was.

And you really don’t want that because you know who loves fast transfers and convenience and having all your money together?

Fraudsters do.

If they can ever penetrate that thin security layer that’s sitting over the soft underbelly of your accounts, your money can be gone instantly.

So we have sort of a saying with Fort Knox that is, keep the convenience of your checking account at your bank and keep your savings in Fort Knox.

They really treat the money differently.

That’s why separating checking and savings.

I can dive into how we do that, or wherever you wanted me to take that, I’m happy.

I definitely want to dive more into it.

But one thing, I think this is a natural transition to my segment, “That’s What You Said.”

You’re flipping the model in another way too.

I believe this was in The Financial Brand, and you were talking about, or it was setting it up for, typical banking metrics would be revenue, assets and earnings growth.

But your quote was, “Our success will be measured by the number of consumers and small business owners we protect from fraud losses, which also minimizes fraud losses for the bank. If we can save one person from losing their life savings, this initiative will be a success.”

To me, that might have been broader than just Fort Knox.

I am super curious about this because I don’t hear too much chatter about, oh, we’ve got to make the KPIs based on the outcomes of the consumer behavior per se.

Tell me more about that.

Well, maybe it’s because I’m not a banker.

I wasn’t a banker when I started this bank.

I’m an entrepreneur.

What I really look for are unmet consumer needs, a large and growing demographic and new technology.

The unmet consumer need here is fraud has exploded.

It’s pervasive.

It can trick you.

It can trick me.

And your average American has no idea of just how many times and all the different methods that the criminals are trying to steal their money.

This will go back to the Ponzi scheme.

When I testified in that trial, one of the victims was a schoolteacher who was retired and lost, I believe the number was $600,000.

Literally, what is she going to do with her life?

She’s retired.

She’s on a fixed income, and she has no savings now.

That really impacted me.

So when I said that comment of, if we can just save one American from losing their money, that is actually who I see in my mind’s eye when I think about that, that retired schoolteacher.

That is being played out hundreds, if not thousands, of times every day here in the United States.

Today, some senior will go to a crypto Bitcoin ATM and they will deposit money and send it to a wallet because they’re being scammed.

That’s happening right now as we’re talking.

Banks and the financial industry have sort of hidden behind education, education, education.

And education isn’t doing it because we can see fraud is growing exponentially.

It’s growing exponentially every single day, every single year.

And all the numbers are underreported.

When you’re the victim of a fraud, first you have to realize you’ve been defrauded, and then you don’t really suffer the loss until you accept that you’re defrauded.

Like if you’re the victim of pig butchering, you don’t really realize it until you accept all the money I put in that platform, that platform is actually all fake and all that money is gone.

Right.

And then there’s the embarrassment of having done this, and so you don’t tell people.

So whatever the fraud numbers that are reported, they’re underreported.

Yeah.

I think the emotional toll, especially with older adults who might be thinking, oh, I’m losing my memory, certainly, it’s such a heartbreaking story for that to happen in that way and to think like it needs to be hidden.

Erik, I want to revisit your comments about savings and checking being separate because I think this is so fascinating because, again, it’s defying what would be typically sold.

I think in the old days, before Wells Fargo had its huge problem of phony accounts, it was like, eight is great.

Eight is great.

Exactly right.

Yeah, it’s terrible.

So this is very intriguing to think about it this way.

But I do believe, correct me if I’m wrong, when I was reading on this product, not every account can be linked to Fort Knox if it’s one of those accounts that seems a little bit more fraudulent, or there are certain bank accounts that maybe have a higher occurrence of fraud.

I just wanted to dial into that too.

Am I understanding that right?

Yeah.

So let me talk a little bit about how the account works.

Yes, we don’t want your spending account.

You keep that wherever you are.

It’s convenient.

You’re either banking locally or with some big bank that has a bunch of services you want.

Keep that convenience.

But what we want to do is make it more secure for you.

Fort Knox actually works with the checking account you already have.

The way we do that is we provide what we call a secure deposit number for your Fort Knox account.

What that is is a routing number and account number that you can use for payroll.

You can use it for your tax refund.

You can use it for Social Security benefits.

That allows you to put money into your Fort Knox account.

It’s a one-way account.

You can actually go put it on the side of your car, your routing number and account number, and drive around town, and nobody can do anything except give you money.

Then when the money goes into Fort Knox, your Fort Knox account actually has an account number that is incompatible with any payment system.

It’s alphanumeric with special characters.

I could tell you mine and you could do whatever you want with it.

It’s not going to work for anything.

Then we connect your Fort Knox account to the checking account you have via what we call closed-loop withdrawal protection.

What we’re doing is we’re using open banking technology to link securely to your checking account.

We make sure that the money can only go from your Fort Knox account to the checking account you have.

And you can move money from the checking account you have to Fort Knox.

It can’t go anywhere else.

We monitor that.

If it’s ever broken, somebody’s trying to hack into your account or whatever, your account goes into lockdown and we instantly lock it down.

That’s designed because so much of fraud depends on speed.

I heard this story once, or read the story once, where a Citibank, maybe not Citibank, a big bank customer got SIM-swapped or had her phone stolen.

In the time it took her to authenticate herself with customer service at this big bank, it was like 37 minutes, she lost $17,000 because all the one-time passcodes were going to her phone or to her SIM card on a different phone.

She couldn’t authenticate herself because all the codes would go there, and meanwhile the criminals are over there draining her accounts.

Gosh.

The stakes are so high, and the ways that one can find themselves out of money, they’re so varied and they range.

Erik, I guess I’m more curious too.

I know this is a younger account, but what demographic are you chasing?

Is it general, or do you find you’re getting traction in a certain area?

Who is your target?

I’ll tell you, it’s across the board.

Really, Fort Knox, we’ve just launched one product on the platform.

We actually built a high-security banking platform and we launched consumer savings first.

This is an even bigger problem for small business when you have BEC, business email compromise, and all these other things.

The demographic is really initially sort of older with money, with resources, that need to protect that.

But we’ve had a lot of children of older parents come and ask us if we can provide an account where they can help their adult parent who’s now maybe entering memory care or aging and just not quite as quick as they used to be.

They’re still intelligent.

They’re just not as quick as they might be.

That they could help protect them.

So we’re seeing both, I want the account for myself.

I want this type of account for my parent.

I want a secure way to receive my IRS tax refund.

I don’t want to share my information with the federal government, who, if you remember a couple years ago, was actually requesting like maybe they should know of every bank account with $600 or more in it.

And people who value their privacy, because we also protect your PII, your personally identifiable information.

We have security zones to protect that.

So we’re really seeing traction and adoption across the board.

We actually have a host of new use cases that have come to our attention.

Oh, tell me.

Expanding?

I can’t tell you them.

They’re top secret.

Not until they build it and roll it out.

But there are a couple that I’m just like, wow.

That is a really, really big market and it’s a really interesting use case.

Yeah, we’re absolutely going to go build it.

You’ve got my mind now thinking about other financial products.

So I almost could kind of see elements of a CD in what you’re describing, in terms of at least you’re not supposed to touch the money.

Some people really dip into their savings.

Do you see it with a little overlap with a CD in any capacity?

Or maybe I’m just totally thinking about this wrong.

Maybe not a CD.

But without giving away too much, you might think that there might be a host of other types of assets that you would want to have in your savings with the security of Fort Knox that maybe aren’t U.S. dollars, cash in a bank account.

So I’ll give you an obvious one.

It would be like Bitcoin.

If you want to put Bitcoin behind the Fort Knox security, that may or may not be on our roadmap.

So wink, wink.

I can’t wink otherwise.

But that’s my own personal limitation.

No, there’s a host of other assets like that.

Yeah.

No, that’s really intriguing, Erik.

And it does open up that industry question that I’ve heard since the beginning of my reporting, which was like 2008.

Where’s the line between convenience and security?

It always seems to move.

Of course, in digital banking, faster payments, it seems to definitely be like quick, quick, quick, quick.

Now, as evidenced by your product, it seems to be moving slightly in the other direction, at least here and there.

Because we also have Charlie, the neobank for older adults, that has a pause button, and it’s called SpeedBump.

The idea is to slow things down in case it’s a scam.

Do you think the industry will move more toward, given how much fraud is increasing, do you think the friction will become more pervasive as a selling point?

Or do you still think it will be more of a fringe thing since it’s still like speed, speed, AI, AI?

You know, I don’t know.

I think it’s really difficult for an incumbent to introduce friction because you bank with the bank, you bank for your debit card or your checking account or your P2P payments because it’s fast and easy.

It’s only the day that you’re defrauded that you’re like, wait a second.

Yeah.

That you have that experience.

So it’s really why we’re separating the use of your money.

We have another slogan.

It’s like, “I really want to transfer my life savings to Southeast Africa instantly overnight,” said no one ever.

Because you don’t need that ability.

You don’t need international wire transfers or whatever they are.

I know that one of the P2P services is now talking about going international.

You just think about all these things.

The faster and more pervasive funds transfer is, you don’t need that.

You actually don’t want it anywhere near the bulk of your savings.

If you’re looking at it, 60 days of money in your checking account and maybe a year of money in your savings account.

So protect the bulk of your money and have convenience so that if you do get defrauded, because look, you’ve been scammed.

I’ve been scammed.

You’re going to suffer a loss at some point.

Make it a manageable, small one, not a life-impacting, devastating loss.

Yeah.

I think that’s really important.

I guess that also opens up the question for the consumers.

Yes, when you get defrauded, you feel it, and then this is going to be top of mind for you on a go-ahead basis.

But in terms of marketing intentional friction, or however you want to bill it, how hard is it?

It’s a newer concept, right?

I think in a lot of ways, it’s a newer concept to a lot of people.

Yeah.

That’s a great question.

What we found is that trying to advertise high-security banking is vague and difficult.

But advertising a unique feature that people can relate to.

So, for example, a secure deposit number.

Use a secure deposit number for everything.

Use this for your tax refund, for your Social Security Administration benefits, for your payroll paycheck, for funds-to-funds transfers.

And anybody who intercepts that number can’t do anything with it.

People are familiar with this because they provide their account and routing number to their employer.

They provide it to the federal government.

They provide it to the state government.

They provide it to another bank.

Well, what if that other bank isn’t really another bank?

It’s a fraudster impersonating a bank.

Well, if I give them a Fort Knox secure deposit number, nothing happens.

They can’t do anything.

If I give them my account number to transfer me money from a quote-unquote normal bank, they can do all sorts of things.

They can try to debit it.

They can try to intercept my one-time passcodes.

There are a whole bunch of ways they can drain my money.

But with a Fort Knox secure deposit number, they literally can’t do anything with it.

Wow.

Erik, I don’t know why this brought my brain to this, but it did.

It seems like another area that this may overlap is there’s confusion or maybe indifference at first to, is this FDIC-insured or not?

Then you see something big happen like the Synapse scandal that happened this year and people getting locked out of their money.

They’re like, what?

I’m not getting my money back?

Or maybe I am, but when is this happening?

Do you think financial services has a marketing problem of the FDIC insurance benefit because of fintech arrangements with banks?

Yeah.

So here’s a key differentiator for, let’s say, your typical fintech.

Your typical fintech is a fintech, and then a third-party technology provider, and then a bank.

There are three parties.

As we’ve seen in the case that you brought up, when something goes bad, everybody points at each other.

Yeah.

It’s like, oh, your ledger is no good.

My ledger is no good.

Where’s the money?

Nobody knows where the money is.

So that is the risk.

You get the convenience of fintech financial services, but your risk is they’re not a bank.

They’re not directly examined by a regulator.

They’re examined by proxy.

I can sort of tell you what that process looks like by proxy, and it’s not really extensive.

And there are three parties.

With Fort Knox, we’re very intentional about this.

There’s one party.

We are the fintech.

We are the technology platform.

We are the bank.

So the buck stops here.

Your money is FDIC-insured.

And if, God forbid, our bank failed, you’re going to get your money back.

Another feature I will share that we’re going to roll out soon is deposit syndication.

So we’re going to run those FDIC-insured limits up to $1 million, $2 million, $3 million, $4 million, $5 million that you can hold in your Fort Knox account.

We launched small intentionally to let fraudsters take a run at us, quite honestly.

Yeah.

Just see.

We thought of everything, but of course we won’t think of everything.

So let people try their best.

Have you been seeing interesting fraudsters come at your account?

We had, what can I share?

We had an instance the other day where I want to say it was like 300,000 unique attacks.

Oh wow.

Something like that.

We’re a community bank, but we are a sophisticated community bank.

So we don’t have any commercial lenders here.

We don’t have any lenders here.

We’ve got about 70 employees, almost 60 of which are all technology employees.

We might have one or two people in our lobby every day, and we’ll open between 500 and 1,000 accounts every day.

So we are really sophisticated.

We know exactly where the bad actors are coming from, how they’re coming at us.

We’ve done redundancy.

When Amazon went down the other week, we use Amazon for some of our stuff, but none of our stuff went down because of the redundancy we’ve built in our platform.

Erik, this is all very interesting, but it opens up another industry challenge that I often hear.

How do you hire tech talent?

What did that look like for you?

How hard was it to source your team, or not hard?

I’ll tell you, being in Austin, Texas helps.

I’m sure.

For sure.

That’s my first thought.

Yes.

Every summer we actually host a bunch of interns.

This year, we brought in a bunch of interns, and they were all for our AI projects.

These interns are from MIT, Harvard, Stanford, Carnegie Mellon.

Just really, these people make me feel really slow, quite honestly.

They’re really young and they’re really, really, really bright.

We actually have retained several of these interns into the bank full-time after they graduate.

Once you have a culture, if you come to our bank, you would see that we’re not a traditional bank culture.

We are a tech company culture, but we’re a friendly one.

We’re not like a dot-com, if you can remember those days, or maybe even the fintech.

We’re like, you know, you’re going to be a gazillionaire on Tuesday, but you’re going to sell your soul down the river and work 12-hour days.

We aren’t.

Here’s your segue.

Here’s your segue that you can write about.

Maybe I’m giving a commercial right now.

If you’re a really qualified technologist, we’re a family-friendly company.

And I get it.

I did those things when I was younger and unmarried.

I did those days.

That’s not really sustainable in the long run.

What we offer is the stability of a bank, a profitable bank, growing bank, with the innovation and innovative culture.

And it’s really fun to work here.

There are a bunch of really smart people solving really complicated issues and creating really new-to-the-world value propositions.

So recruiting is not as challenging as it might be at another institution because we aren’t like any other institution that I’m aware of.

Erik, you mentioned, and I was curious about it when you mentioned it, so I want to mention it now.

You said you’re an entrepreneur who became a bank CEO.

How did that dream evolve?

Yeah.

So I’m actually the black sheep of my family.

I was supposed to be a doctor.

My dad’s a doctor.

My mom’s a nurse.

My brother’s a doctor.

And I wanted to be an entrepreneur.

So the evolution was I told my dad I didn’t want to be in medicine, and then I didn’t know how to be an entrepreneur.

So I studied accounting, and then I worked for one of the Big Four, KPMG.

Then I went to Michigan, got my degree in marketing and strategy.

I’m from Michigan, by the way.

Oh, awesome.

Go Blue.

Then I went to Procter & Gamble because it’s what you did back in the day.

Then I went into brand management.

You learned how to run a company.

I worked in their new ventures group.

What’s going to be the next billion-dollar business?

Then I left that for fame and fortune during the first boom.

I left right before, about four months before, the dot-com bust.

How I ended up in this banking position is I came down to Austin and I helped turn around a company.

I was a product manager and product marketing manager for a company called Works.

We turned this company around and created a payments platform, and then Bank of America acquired that company.

Then I was hanging out in Austin.

I saw all these opportunities for financial services.

This is before BaaS and fintech and all this stuff.

This is like ’04.

All these opportunities had the common denominator of you needed a bank to do it.

So I tried to partner with a bank for a long time.

I got older and poorer, like three years older and poorer.

Then finally, I got a business partner through that, and we were like, you know what?

Let’s just go start our own.

So with no experience in banking, and right before the global financial crisis, we opened up our bank in 2006 with $6.1 million of capital.

You can never do it again, and I wouldn’t recommend anybody do it again.

But that’s how I got into banking.

Then 20 years of learning from all the experience of how to run a bank in a safe and sound manner, but then also how to be innovative and entrepreneurial in that same setting.

You talk about convenience and safety are juxtaposed against each other.

Innovation and regulation are juxtaposed against each other.

So I deal with that challenge every day.

Yeah.

You’re a man up against counterintuitive tensions, I guess I would say.

Well, I would say...

Oh, go ahead.

No, no, no.

I was going to say, I may or may not have been told by a regulator or two that, like, you can’t do that.

Nobody would ever want that product or service.

Then a couple years later, we have hundreds of thousands of people with that product or service.

But nobody’s ever done it before.

So, you know, you can’t...

Haters gonna hate.

I know.

The data will reveal itself, right?

Yeah.

It’s been an interesting ride.

And it still will be, I’m sure.

I just have a couple more questions for you.

One is, if you had one piece of advice for other banks or credit unions that you want to help with this whole concept of reduce fraud, not accelerate fraud, what would be one piece of advice that you’re like, oh, I want to see more of this?

Or certainly maybe don’t do that, or take it in another direction that I’m not including.

Maybe we should all work together on account ownership verification.

So that if we had a system, and I’ve mentioned this, it’d be great if FedNow did this.

I know there’s some Early Warning stuff, but like in a consortium or just a system that banks could instantly, easily and inexpensively verify the beneficiary of a payment or the owner of an account.

So that you know exactly where your person, like my customer, is trying to send their money or who my customer is receiving money from.

That would be a really great industry initiative, account ownership verification, instant and inexpensive and comprehensive, pervasive.

I think that’s a great piece of advice.

And if someone wanted to reach you or find out more or work with Fort Knox in some way, what’s the best way, Erik?

Well, the best way to learn about Fort Knox is to go to FortKnox.bank.

And we use .bank because it’s much harder to spoof and phish.

So it is purposefully .bank.

If you want to reach me, you can reach out to me on LinkedIn.

Or you can send me an email at Austin Capital Bank or contact Austin Capital Bank, and we can get in touch.

And Erik, last question for you.

What’s the image on your phone’s lock screen?

It’s me and my family at Disneyland.

Yeah.

So I don’t know if you can see.

Yeah, a little bit.

Yeah.

That’s so sweet.

Yeah.

So that’s a great question.

It’s me and my wife and two little guys.

So, Erik, thank you so much for being on the show with me today.

It’s a delight to be able to hang out with you and find out all about this product that is very surprising, and I’m excited to watch your journey.

Mary, it was a lot of fun.

Thanks for having me on.

Okay.

So one thing I learned is there is a bank out there that doesn’t want your checking and your savings.

And that is in order to reduce the significance of fraud if it’s happening.

As Erik told me, they shouldn’t be held in close proximity to each other.

What a surprise.

If you enjoyed today’s Money Isn’t Everything episode, make sure to hit that follow button on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, or wherever you’re listening.

This is the last episode of the season, but we’ll be up and running in January with more interviews.

So get ready and happy New Year.

And even before then, catch our virtual GonzoBanker Awards on December 16 at 11:00 a.m. Pacific.

All of the podcast hosts will be there dishing out awards, and that includes me.

Happy holidays.