The Bank That Wanted Its Customers on the Cap Table

Imagine opening a bank account and finding a share certificate tucked in beside the debit card. That was the seduction of Good Money. Its founders wanted the customer to be more than a source of deposits, transaction fees and useful data. The customer, they said, should have a piece of the enterprise. This was a peculiar proposal in an industry that usually offers a toaster, a points balance or an earnest advertisement about community.

The company came from Gunnar Lovelace, a co-founder of the online organic grocer Thrive Market, and a team whose public profiles include technologist Poornaprajna Udupi, Mike Zhang, Andrew Masanto, Bear Kittay and Katiyana Kittay. Thrive had made a business out of the idea that a routine purchase could signal a set of values. Good Money tried the same move with something more intimate: the account into which a paycheck lands.

A bank account with a cap table attached

The 2018 announcement set out a familiar neobank menu: online and peer-to-peer banking, savings accounts described as FDIC insured, free ATM access, no overdraft fees and consumer loans. The unusual item was equity. Customers would receive shares on opening an account and could earn more by installing the app, setting up direct deposit or referring friends. In other words, Good Money intended to turn routine customer acquisition into a distribution of ownership.

That pitch had two audiences. For a person unhappy with bank charges, the practical appeal was a mobile account with fewer fees. For a person unhappy with where finance sends its money, the appeal was a voice in how the company would use its profits. Good Money pledged to direct half of those profits to projects addressing inequality, the environment and renewable energy. The founders also said they would commit half their own equity to philanthropy and impact.

The distinction between profits and revenue matters. If a company has no profit, a promise to donate a percentage of profit may produce no donation at all. It was still an unusually explicit attempt to write a public purpose into the economics of a consumer finance business. Good Money’s useful provocation was to put that arithmetic where customers could see it.

The reward was a stake, not a smoothie

Good Money’s proposed Good Shares gave the ownership idea a consumer shape. Brazil Journal reported in 2020 that shares were distributed as users met goals such as referrals, card use and money transfers. The company had split its capital into a huge number of small units, making it possible to award slivers rather than grand blocks. The mechanics were consequential: a rewards program normally expires into airline miles or gift cards, while a company share may gain value only if the company itself does.

That also makes the offer more complicated than a conventional cash-back percentage. Equity in a private fintech is illiquid. Its value depends on a future event and on the rights attached to the shares. Forbes reported in 2019 that customers would not have voting rights until registration of the shares. A customer could be an owner in the economic sense without immediately becoming a boardroom elector. The phrase “customer owned” carried a real idea and a fine-print question at the same time.

The card proposition evolved in public descriptions. A 2021 climate-fintech report described rewards of at least 1% of purchases in a basket of values-aligned public equities, plus an environmental benefit. Other company listings used a cash-back description. Those accounts describe different moments of a young product, so any reader considering an account would need current terms. The durable idea was that spending should create an asset for the spender rather than only a fee for the institution.

The long distance between a promise and a product

Good Money’s first announcement said a waitlist would open in January 2019 and a full platform would follow later that year. A 2019 technology profile still described the product as in development and pointed readers to the waitlist. The launch, according to a July 2020 report in Brazil Journal, had happened about a month earlier. This is the part of fintech folklore that the elegant mockups rarely show: banking takes legal work, infrastructure, capital and patience before a persuasive concept can become an account someone can use.

The same report said the app had more than 200,000 users and that Good Money had raised about $45 million by that point. The disclosed financing anchor is the $30 million Series A of December 2018, with Galaxy Digital’s EOS VC fund in the lead and a long list of backers including Breyer Capital and Boost VC. Positive Ventures, a Brazilian impact investor, told Brazil Journal it had put $1 million into a later round. Those figures show the cost of attempting to make the model real; they do not tell us a current valuation or a current revenue run rate.

The team also had to solve a subtler problem. Give customers a reward with an immediate dollar value and it is easy to explain. Give them private-company equity and the sales sentence becomes a lesson in liquidity, risk and governance. Good Money’s bet was that enough people cared about who owned the banking platform, and what it funded, to sit through that lesson.

A climate claim measured in trees

The climate side of the pitch did produce at least one concrete public metric. A New Energy Nexus report said Good Money’s partnership with The Rainforest Initiative had protected nearly one million trees by November 2020. It described a “Good Deeds” initiative and the pledge to send half of profits to social and environmental causes. Brazil Journal also reported a policy against financing oil, tobacco, gambling, private prisons and companies perpetuating racism, and said some card interchange revenue supported Indigenous communities in Peru.

Those details made Good Money different from a generic mobile account with a green button. The customer would use the same ordinary behaviors - deposit, swipe, refer - but the platform proposed to change who received the economic benefit and where some of the money went. Chime, Varo and Current were also competing on convenience and fees. Good Money’s distinguishing claim was ownership joined to impact. A values-based credit union or community bank could offer another route for someone who preferred member governance, but Good Money wrapped its theory in a national consumer app.

There is a lesson here that travels beyond banking. If a company asks customers to “vote with their wallets,” it should specify the ballot. Good Money tried to specify three things: a customer stake, a fraction of profits and a set of causes. Whether any particular person should use the product depends on current account terms, the legal rights of the shares and the clarity of the impact reporting. Those are questions the ownership idea itself invites.

Good Money’s public record is fullest at its launch. It shows an ambitious proposition, a well-funded build and reported early use; it does not turn an old savings rate or a 2020 user count into a present-day guarantee. What remains vivid is the inversion at the center of the pitch. Banks have long asked customers to trust them with money. Good Money asked what would happen if the customers were allowed to own a little of the trust.