EXCLUSIVE— With its upcoming SoFi Money accounts, personal finance and lending startup SoFi wants to provide banking consumers with a checking account for the new age: one that keeps the convenience of such an account and eliminates everything else.
“SoFi Money is the best of a checking account and a savings account,” Jennifer Delaney, director of product management for SoFi told Bank Innovation. “It’s an online, mobile-first experience.”
While customers are still using checking accounts, many are getting frustrated with the decisions of incumbent banks to raise fees (such as Bank of America) set a deposit limit (such as JPMorgan Chase), or otherwise find ways to make simple banking transactions frustrating.
SoFi’s account, which will be available for consumers in beta form this spring — the company is currently conducting an employee test — seeks to change that by providing what is only nominally a checking account.
The account comes with no fees, a debit card, bill payment, and all of the other standards of a checking account, Delaney says — plus, an interest rate of 0.92%, which is about “23 times higher than the national average,” Delaney said.
As SoFi does not have a banking license, it is partnering with six banks to facilitate these accounts, though the company is not publicly naming the banks at this time, Delaney said. The account does not include credit products as yet, Delaney said.
The account will also come with access to SoFI’s membership community, which comes with money advice, career guidance, and other tools for managing one’s finances, Delaney said.
“Part of SoFi’s vision is, all of these different products in the same app,” Delaney said, which would include SoFi Money, the company’s refinancing tools, and other features such as SoFi Advice—another upcoming product that will offer users automated investing, borrowing, and budgeting information, Delaney said.
“Advice is an extension of our wealth management product, that would serve as the budgeting tool [in the app],” Delaney said. “Advice is going to sit on top of all of [SoFi’s] products.”
Delaney noted that Advice would be coming out later this year, though she could not name a specific time when the service would become available.
As of January 2018, SoFi had over 430,000 members on its platform, and had originated $25 billion in loans since its founding in 2011.
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