How is the mobile bank account GoBank, a product of prepaid card company Green Dot Corp., doing in the marketplace?

It’s anybody’s guess. GoBank watchers have learned to feast on scraps, as Green Dot keeps its numbers a closely watched secret. Green Dot’s prepaid cards number nearly 5 million, but GoBank, which offers richer functionality and lower fees, is not seeing nearly as much pickup.

Green Dot was the first major prepaid card to be sold in retail locations, and it has built a strong brand and loyal following over the years among its base of users employing alternative financial services, such as check-cashing.

GoBank began life targeting mobile-phone loving (and fee-averse) millennials, but gradually shifted from the app stores to a card-based retail distribution model. Green Dot cards and GoBank cards are sold side-by-side in Walmart’s payment card section, and this very placement may confuse the value proposition.

On yesterday’s earnings call, Green Dot CEO Steve Streit revealed slightly more than usual, while maintaining the same sanguine tone he has maintained since the mobile bank account launched in the summer of 2013. Specifically, Streit said that 60% of all GoBank accounts 60 days or older employ direct deposit, and revenue per account is up 35% over last year. Revenue comes primarily from membership fees and interchange on transactions, he said.

Green Dot also launched a new barcode-based cash-deposit system yesterday.

Regarding the future, Streit said, “We have great hopes for GoBank and we’re currently working on deploying some important GoBank distribution partnerships that we should be able to share details about later in the year.” In the past the company has distributed GoBank in retail locations including Rite Aid, KMart, and Barnes & Noble college bookstores. Currently, however, it is only available at Walmart. Green Dot renewed its crucially important contract with Walmart for five years in June, though it is unclear if this agreement means GoBank will continue to be a Walmart-only product.

During the Q&A, Streit was asked if GoBank would hit the million-account mark by year’s end, as Streit had previously indicated, according to the questioner.

Streit replied that he meant a run-rate of 1 million accounts per year, and gave a few hints as to how the bank might approach those numbers:

So what I said was [if we] wanted to get to a run-rate of 1 million accounts by the end of the year, we should be about 90,000 new accounts per month. I think with some of the new partners that we have we can get there. We’re not there today, which I indicated on the last call and simply the retail distribution. So we haven’t given an active account number for GoBank but it is going very nicely and people who get it love it, but we need to issue more, that’s the best way to say it. It doesn’t sell as the same rate of our prepaid cards, it retains about 10 times longer than our prepaid cards in terms of the number of dollars spent in usage and all that. But we need to get more accounts out the door and we’re working to better define the value proposition to the customers, so that they understand it’s a checking account, which is a new concept to sell off the rack. And then we’re going to rely on some of our new partnerships to drive the acquisition rate. So I’m not sure if we’ll get to the 90,000 a month by the end of the year, and we have a number of initiatives to help push us towards that direction.

The upshot is that GoBank customers are more valuable than Green Dot cardholders on an individual basis, but in aggregate, Green Dot cards’ vastly greater numbers render GoBank almost insignificant on the company’s balance sheet. This must be a source of frustration to Streit. The company has spent considerable resources attempting to communicate its value proposition, but it still fails to gain traction.