Automation as inclusion with Current

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The Financial Revolutionist: How do you describe Current?

Josh Stephens: At a high level, Current is a mobile banking platform. We provide banking services to a large swath of Americans—over 4 million members. Our users tend to be looking for solutions that don't exist within the market. So in particular, folks who make a little bit less money, folks who are looking for better and automated banking services, and more transparent services that have greater ease of use.

We're servicing a demographic whom we look at as being left behind by traditional institutions. They tend to come to us often for faster access to money as one of our main value props.

So it sounds like automation is helping Current’s efforts to be inclusive. You talked about quicker access to money as part of that. Is there anything else about automation that makes it a social net positive?

We can think about it from the perspective of ease of use within financial services: Ease of use is not something that I think is top of mind or front of house for many folks in financial services. 

I think a lot of the education component of financial services—that it’s a big hill to climb to understand how to do basic things like save effectively or spend effectively—comes down to the fact that most services are built in a far more convoluted way and really are set up for people who have more money as opposed to less. For Current in particular, almost 50% of our members never had a bank account before, though that number is shifting. 

Security and compliance are of course very important; we also try to make things easy to understand. For folks who, for example, have struggled to save money because they're living paycheck to paycheck, it opens up the opportunity to very easily begin to automate things so that the process of saving doesn't feel like a chore. 

And beyond the mental barrier of saving when you live closer to the edge and putting away a larger percentage of your paycheck, the reality with many larger institutions is that they’re forcing folks to keep a savings account with a certain amount of money in there because they have lending-based models, which require them to ensure that folks have a certain amount of balance, or else they get hit with fees. 

And there's the brick-and-mortar issue of bank branches being open at certain times, versus automated technologies that work around the clock.

We’re getting into the question of why fintech is successful. A big reason why businesses like Current have been able to survive is that when you really go digital first—and in our case mobile first—you start leveraging technology that enables product experiences and user experiences that are not otherwise possible. Especially compared to a business that's been optimized for someone coming in and talking to a teller or whatever it might be.

What does that look like for Current?

First and foremost, it’s trying to make it as easy as possible for folks to get their direct deposit set up in an automated way. From there, it's making it as easy as possible for folks to begin to automate where that money flows to. Automating the roundups on their purchases, for example, or adding small amounts of money that can be put into savings pods. 

It allows folks to start adding up money over time over time and help them keep on track or set their goals. Savings pods have consistently been one of our most engaged features, in large part because we provide the flexibility and the automation for people to use it how they want. To your point on equity, it comes down to the fact that we empower people to make the decisions they want. We’ve doubled down on ease of use to help them hit their financial goals.

What’s next for Current in the coming year?

We’re moving to credit. It's obviously a wild macro environment right now, but we really believe that better access to credit is going to be more important. Our customers want liquidity and they want better ways to improve their financial outcomes. Because most credit providers tend to work under more old-fashioned ways of thinking through creditworthiness, we believe there's still a huge opportunity here. So that's going to start with a secured product, and then moving into other forms of unsecured credit. 

With transparency and ease of use top of mind, we're trying to make sure people have a really good sense and are clear on what the opportunity is.