Fintech / Founder Profile
Eric Solis
He builds a bank that fits in a pocket - for the people who were never let inside one.
Eric Solis - the banker who quit banking to fix it.
He builds a bank that fits in a pocket - for the people who were never let inside one.
Open the MovoCash app and you can send money to a stranger across town, lock how much a single retailer is allowed to touch, or hand someone Bitcoin they've never heard of and watch it land on a debit card in minutes. No branch. No teller. No paperwork pile. That is the product Eric Solis spent years patenting, and it is also a quiet argument about who the financial system is supposed to serve.
Solis is the founder and CEO of MovoCash, Inc., a company he describes in the plainest possible terms: help people take charge of their money in the simplest way possible. The platform he calls MOVO bundles on-demand banking, distributed-ledger technology and AI into something he named Real Time Payment Cards - digital cash you mint, send, and spend straight from a phone. The funds sit in FDIC-insured partner banks. The experience feels less like a bank and more like texting money.
What makes the pitch land is the resume behind it. Solis is not a coder who stumbled into finance. He spent more than 25 years inside it - a senior vice president of investments at Merrill Lynch, a vice president of investments at Prudential Securities, the operator of his own Solis Investment Group. He holds the licenses that make Wall Street run: FINRA Series 7, 24, 65 and 63, plus a Certified Financial Planner designation. Then he walked out to build for the people those firms quietly priced out.
The story Solis keeps returning to is not a boardroom. It is a childhood kitchen. His mother, a small business owner going through a divorce, was crying because she could not pay the bills. He found her there. He has spent the rest of his life answering that scene.
"I've wanted to help people take charge of their finances," he says - and the through-line is unmistakable across three companies. First SaveDaily.com, a financial-literacy and micro-investing startup. Then SAVE252 Systems, a technology platform aimed squarely at the underbanked. Then MovoCash, where the mission finally got a patent and a debit card.
There is a fighter in the family tree, too. His grandfather was a professional boxer nicknamed "Haymaker Hagar," who reportedly set a record for getting knocked down - and getting back up. Solis treats it less as trivia than as instruction.
A patented platform that issues Real Time Payment Cards - digital cash created on demand, combining on-demand banking, distributed ledgers and AI behind issuer-grade encryption.
Send a value like Bitcoin to a friend who knows nothing about crypto. They claim the funds and spend them on a debit card within minutes. Vertical banking, turned horizontal.
"You control how much that specific retailer has access to." Fraud becomes a design choice - you decide who can reach your balance, and for how much.
A dollar-denominated digital currency concept, paired with the ability to mint custom "cash" denominations for specific, single-purpose uses.
FDIC-insured funds through partner banks, a Mastercard partnership, and compliance built for the Patriot Act, AML, BSA and OFAC - not a workaround around them.
Aimed at the roughly 22% of Americans the traditional system leaves out - faster, easier, more secure access to their own money, no branch required.
Solis is wary of the word "expert." He'd rather find dedicated, visionary people and grow them into what he calls "MoMentors." He thinks of himself as a "full-stack entrepreneur" - the kind of CEO still doing operational work, not just signing off on it.
His worldview has a name, too: the "invisible hand." He believes the right solutions arrive through faith and timing, and that the job of a founder is to be purposeful rather than reactive - to disrupt a broken process on purpose, not to flinch at it.
He extends the idea past borders. Technology, he argues, should help developing economies build their own financial infrastructure rather than import Wall Street's - keeping talent and entrepreneurs at home instead of bleeding them abroad.
Early on, he paid to enter a business award competition and flew out for the ceremony - then watched every contestant but him win. He laughed it off, and vowed never to pay for industry recognition again.
His grandfather, "Haymaker Hagar," was a pro fighter said to hold a record for getting knocked down - and standing back up. It's Solis's favorite metaphor for building a company.
He's collected continuing-education credits in Bitcoin, AI and business from MIT, Oxford and Stanford - and sits on the volunteer side of Stanford Seed.
His team aren't reports - they're "MoMentors." His philosophy isn't a strategy deck - it's the "invisible hand." He builds his own language as he builds the product.