Green Dot to Launch 2 Account Products, Build Out BaaS Platform

Green Dot , a Pasadena-Calif.-based financial services company with a banking license, is making no secret of its success and broader ambitions with banking-as-a-service . CEO Steve Streit mapped out a six-step plan for growth in 2019, in which the BaaS platform loomed large, during the company's 4Q18 earnings call on Wednesday . The company plans to design, develop and launch two new account products this year that target Generation Z, which Streit loosely defined as a generation of digital natives who are slightly younger than millennials. “We believe they'll embrace something very different than what you and I today know to be a bank account,” Streit said. “It's a product concept we call GenZ MODE, which stands for mobile-only digital everything. And we think it's a demographic and product design philosophy where Green Dot has a strong natural advantage.” Streit said the company also plans to design, build and release two new iterations of its BaaS platform over the next year or so. “In order to power true innovation for Green Dot and its partners, like designing products in GenZ MODE, our BaaS platform must continually evolve to ensure that Silicon Valley's best and brightest product designers can have an ever-growing collection of tools and capabilities that allow them to build what they want,” Streit said. BaaS 3.0, he said, builds upon the features, functionality and risk controls of BaaS 1.0 and 2.0 but also adds "a new user experience capability" to give designers a "highly flexible illustration of a wide variety of creative designs inflows" for applications and websites. "This isn't about putting your client's logo on this screen or that screen to create the appearance of a custom website," Streit said. "This is about being able to simultaneously power hundreds of apps, websites, bank accounts and physical card programs — two of which look the same, work the same or do the same things — all within the ecosystem of one powerful platform." Once BaaS 3.0 is in production, he said, the company intends to begin work on BaaS 4.0, potentially for release in the first half of 2020. He said BaaS 4.0 will build upon previous versions by enabling "new and more versatile" automated program management and compliance tools to "prudently and responsibly manage growth." Streit also wants Green Dot to repackage assets like the bank, the BaaS platform, as well as regulatory risk management, legal/compliance and program management capabilities into one integrated bundle, "making all of it easily consumable to a broader segment of BaaS partners, product designers and developers." He said those assets have really only been available to partners with big technology and product teams with an enterprise-level partnership with Green Dot. "Envision an offering where a business owner, product manager or developer can simply log onto the best platform, apply for credentials and upon being granted access could begin to use our robust set of tools and APIs to design and build their own financial services project at their own pace," Streit said. "We believe that using our BaaS platform as a modern grassroots distribution platform is a very big idea that could power growth and mass innovation for years to come." Green Dot is calling this project bOS, which stands for "bank operating system," and hopes to launch it into production "by 2020." "I want to be clear that this is a big idea," Streit said. "And we believe bank OS has the potential to become one of the biggest initiatives in Green Dot's history. The potential customers for bOS — think of just app developers alone — could be substantial, but it will require the right dedicated leadership, a significant amount of technology and government work and investment and the right support from nearly every division across the company." To this end, Streit announced Kuan Archer, current COO and Head of Technology for Green Dot, is being promoted to President, Chief Products and Technology Officer, starting next week. "In this new role, Kuan will be able to fully focus his time, energy and talent on leading our large team of technology and product development leaders across the U.S. and China to efficiently deliver on the innovative and powerful strategies before us," he said. Also see: Green Dot’s Banking-as-a-Service Revenue Is Now Equal to Product Revenue Streit also hinted at more M&A activity on the horizon. "While expanding our capacity and reinforcing our operating platform will always be an ongoing work in progress, we are in a very good place now to again become more aggressive in searching for appropriate acquisitions," he said. "While the M&A pipelines are potentially robust, we have nothing to share today on anything near term." Green Dot's products and platform model generated total consolidated operating revenue of $238 million in the fourth quarter of 2018, representing a 12% year-over-year increase, and just over $1 billion for the year, a YOY increase of 17%. Streit said this growth was helped in large part by the revenue contribution from new and existing BaaS platform programs "that grew at a faster pace than our previously established product lines.” “Innovation sells and it's our belief that continuing to focus our energy and resources on our strategy to build the industry's most prolific platform for fintech innovation, BaaS, Banking-as-a-Service, will help keep Green Dot vital and growing for many years to come," he said. Green Dot has a market cap of $3.53 billion. As of 12:30 p.m. ET, shares in the company were down 10.15% Seth Ross, senior vice president of business development at Green Dot, will speak at FinAi News Ignite 2019 , March 11-12, at Seattle’s Hyatt Olive 8 Hotel. Register here .

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Green Dot to Launch 2 Account Products, Build Out BaaS Platform

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