Customer service

A former Bank of America employee has developed an app tailored to women after recognizing gender disparities in investing regardless of education or financial literacy levels.

Feli Oikonomopoulou, founder and CEO of WealthMeUp, served as legal counsel and vice president at Bank of America in London for four years before moving to the U.S. to study at the Yale School of Management last year.

While working in the financial industry for more than eight years in the U.K., Luxembourg, France, Greece, Singapore and the U.S., Oikonomopoulou encountered gender inequality as an international issue when she noticed her female colleagues were less likely to invest than men. In diving into the issue, she said she realized financial services firms don’t do much to cater to women when they structure their products.

WealthMeUp, a free tool aimed at revolutionizing how women approach investing, is designed with a woman’s lifestyle and spending habits in mind, Oikonomopoulou told Banking Dive. The beta version of the app, launched in June, is for everyone to use but is built specifically for women, she said.

“The company is about financial literacy and investing, and our vision is to revolutionize the way that women engage with their investments and simply turn purchases into investment opportunities,” she said.

Women drive 80% of consumer spending but have often been underrepresented in the investment space, she said. A recent study from the World Economic Forum highlights that if women invested more, it could initiate an additional $3 trillion in global investment capital.

Oikonomopoulou, originally from Greece, said she left the country because of the financial crisis. Her experience in Greece made her realize that when an imbalance happens, those without knowledge of financial management are disproportionately affected.

WealthMeUp, developed while Oikonomopoulou was completing her MBA at Yale, has a core team of three members, including the founder — plus a team of advisers, interns and external contractors. The interns are from Cornell, Columbia and New York University.

The app focuses on financial education for Gen Z and millennial women and has most users from these schools or the area. This has paved the way for Oikonomopoulou to discuss introducing the product to the schools.

Investing in literacy

The app aims to present users with steps to make it easier for them to gain knowledge and invest.

The first is the financial education tool — currently being launched — to clear up misconceptions around investing, Oikonomopoulou said. There are 140 short courses that each take roughly five minutes to complete, covering seven financial topics designed to help women learn the basics of stocks, bonds, mutual funds and other investment options. After the user engages with a tool, she is rewarded with points, which can be redeemed through products or services offered at no cost through the app’s partnering firms.

“Therefore, you associate financial learning to begin with a positive habit and with something that rewards you with something that you need,” she said.

The next step: guide the user through investment options available on the platform with the help of financial coaches and financial advisers who work with the firm. That feature is in the pilot stage.

Oikonomopoulou also plans to implement a revenue-sharing model in which the firm partners with a bank or a credit card company that offers cash back on a user’s spending and redirects that to her investment account. 

“Turning your spending habits into investment opportunities in a very safe way, given the cashback that you receive on your spending, is essentially free money that you were not expecting to come,” she said.

While building the app, Oikonomopoulou sought feedback from men and women to assess their preferences regarding investing. While women expressed a preference for goal-oriented self-development, men preferred monetary value, which could be less than $1, she noted.

Structure and rewards

Financial services apps like Acorns have a similar model of investing spare change, but WealthMeUp's mission is female-focused. The company partners with female-led companies for cash back rewards, using those rewards to invest rather than accumulate spare change, Oikonomopoulou said.

Oikonomopoulou views Ellevest, a robo-adviser investment platform and financial literacy program, as the biggest competitor in the female investor and female-focused financial services space, but she doesn't see it as a direct rival. She instead considers Ellevest a partner in working toward the shared vision of promoting female investing and putting more money into the hands of women.

WealthMeUp also works with the fitness franchise Orangetheory and financial coaching service FemFinancial. While explaining how the rewards system works, Oikonomopoulou said that when app users accumulate 3,000 points, they can redeem those for two one-hour sessions at Orangetheory or some merchandise.

Oikonomopoulou said she thinks the next phase of the fintech revolution is here, and that women can play a fundamental role in it because this stage involves “financial products to be more personalized and more integrated into our very personal needs and habits.” 

A year ago, Silicon Valley Bank failed, spurring a crisis that took down at least two other banks, sent regional lenders’ value spiraling, and prompted competitors across the finance sphere to fight for upended clients.

The impact of SVB’s demise, though, was arguably felt most in the fintech space.

Mercury, a startup-focused neobank, worked swiftly on March 11 and 12, 2023, to launch Mercury Vault offering up to $3 million in Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. insurance, later expanding that to $5 million through its partner banks and their sweep networks. Customers who use Vault can have their money set up with Treasury accounts that give them access to the U.S. government short-term T-bills by Vanguard.

In the five days following SVB's collapse, more than 8,700 new customers came to Mercury with more than $2 billion in deposits, the San Francisco-based company said.

A year later, CEO Immad Akhund said Mercury’s market share has increased among early-stage startups due to bolstered awareness and a shift away from the failed bank, even though SVB’s assets have new owners. Mercury continues to launch new initiatives while focusing on its objectives, with startups occupying a big part of that.

“Mercury has been a startup all along, so we’re used to adversity,” Akhund told Banking Dive. “Even before this SVB and a March 2023 situation, we've been growing nicely. So, let's say the big thing that's changed over the last year is...it feels like our market share is a lot higher, especially among early-stage startups. SVB is still around, but it's no longer kind of this kind of 800-pound gorilla that was often the default choice in the startup world."

At the beginning of last year, Mercury had around 400 employees, but that number has grown to around 600 today. Mercury’s customer base grew 60% year over year, and six months after the SVB collapse, 92% of net new customers from March stayed with it, and their deposits held steady, the company noted.

MoneyLion, meanwhile, has diversified its banking relationships and technology to mitigate the risk following SVB’s failure.

MoneyLion CEO Dee Choubey said he thinks SVB was one of the few banks that truly understood venture debt, which was crucial for the broader capital allocation process within the tech hub. SVB served as a backbone, enabling a flow of capital that bridged the gap between venture capitalists and startups as they graduated from the initial funding rounds to an eventual public offering.

“It really kind of sent massive ripples through the ecosystem,” Choubey said. “I'd be lying if I said that it didn't create some consternation and a lot of stress that weekend. Because you always know theoretically that your systems are resilient, but in practice when millions and hundreds of millions of dollars are going through your pipes that weekend, the practicality of it is sometimes a little different.”

The New York City-based fintech had significant relationships with SVB on venture debt, cash management and treasury management. MoneyLion has diversified its banking relationships and technology to mitigate risk following SVB’s failure. It also brought in more bank partners. When SVB failed, MoneyLion switched processing to other banks with no adverse impact on customers.

“The way we've changed operationally over the years, we've become even more resilient. You could tell me Bank X is failing and we have a whole process for mitigating that risk. So, a lot more operationally resilient and even more than we were a year ago,” Choubey said.

Updated business model

Fintechs are trying to bolster their customer base by offering products that speak to the changing digital landscape.

MoneyLion is focusing on its artificial intelligence-powered personal finance management insights — a tool that would let customers have conversations as one would with ChatGPT, answering questions like where users have invested and how and when they saved. The fintech aims to give its customers every tool that have different inflection points either through its consumer app or on a white-label basis for anyone in the digital world, Choubey said.

“All of that together — the go-to-market is something that we've been really working on to make the business model a lot more resilient from where it was a year ago,” he added.

MoneyLion reported a 60% gross margin in 2023, compared with 57% in 2022. The company expanded its distribution capabilities by collaborating with Ernst & Young to bring innovation in the banking space.

Akhund said he thinks AI will be more useful in the back-office side of fintechs, like fraud detection, rather than asking chatbots to transfer money. Mercury built its platform so customers can use it for all financial workflows across their entire teams, leading to the creation of Mercury Treasury and Venture Debt and, more recently, the launch of credit card IO. The credit card launched in September 2022 and has been designed to empower founders and finance teams and to help them scale their business. The company is seeing consistent IO growth month over month, it said.

Companies like Mercury are “becoming like kind of financial super apps” — bundling features on both software and financial sides, Akhund said.

What to expect

Choubey said he thinks the bank-fintech partnership framework is robust, and these partnerships have grown due to banks’ need for digital capabilities, despite the scrutiny.

However, Akhund said that since this is an election year, he doesn’t expect new regulations, but regulators might work with banks to determine the right partnership model.

Akhund said he thinks fintech innovation will grow in the next decade despite its current lull.

There will be probably a few more sponsor banks pulling out of the space, he said.

“Along with that, there will be some fintechs that will also pull out of the space partly because the funding environment for fintechs is not great. And obviously, a lot of startups are basically like an experiment and not all experiments succeed. So, I think that's how I see this year playing out — a reinvestment in terms of who remains in the area and who comes out on the other side,” Akhund noted.

Sacramento, California-based Golden 1 Credit Union has seen a 28% increase in approvals to protected classes of borrowers since it started using artificial intelligence for loan decisions, its CEO, Donna Bland, said in March at America’s Credit Unions’ Governmental Affairs Conference.

The credit union knew it was losing solid loans to other lenders due to faulty data, Bland said. So Golden 1 partnered with Zest AI to build its own customized credit scorecard.

Golden 1 is using data not only from the credit union’s membership in the algorithm but also from other Californians “who looked like our membership” to help grow the database, Bland said. 

Golden 1 launched the scorecard in December 2022 — first with credit cards and, then last year, with unsecured and auto loans. 

The results have been more powerful than the credit union even envisioned, Bland said. The AI-driven scorecard led to higher loan approvals overall but especially among protected classes, including women, Latinx and Black people, and members older than 62, the executive said. 

“What that means for us is that we’re no longer denying tens of thousands of people,” Bland said. “We originate over $6 billion in loans a year … and that not only means Californians have more access to equitable credit, it's also good for the credit union and our financial position.”

Oak Ridge, Tennessee-based ORNL Federal Credit Union also partnered with Zest AI to help the institution make better lending decisions, CEO Jenny Vipperman said.

For the $3.6 billion-asset credit union, “one size does not fit all” when it comes to rating potential borrowers.

“A national score was the best that we had when it was the best that we had,” Vipperman said. “But today, I’m looking for a score that can look at my fellow Tennesseans and saying ‘what they’re using to make a decision in California cannot possible make the most accurate decision in Tennessee.’”

Bland said more relevant information is critical for scoring potential borrowers and making better loan decisions. She said Golden 1’s membership is composed completely of Californians, but that demographic is different from the nation as a whole. 

“California financial-wise can be very different from other parts of the nation,” she said. “So relying on national and traditional scoring models can paint the wrong picture when the credit union is making loan decisions.”

At $21.1 billion in assets, Golden 1 is the sixth-largest credit union in the country but the biggest using AI for lending.

Jennifer Golbeck, director of the social intelligence lab at the University of Maryland, said financial institutions must be careful when deploying AI for credit decisions. She pointed to a situation in 2008, where the algorithm being used by Wells Fargo to make mortgage decisions was found to have racial biases.

Race was not a part of the data, but the algorithm picked up on the fact that decisions made by Wells employees led to certain populations being pushed into subprime mortgages where whites with the same financial profile were not.

"If humans are racially biased in the way that they’re handing out mortgages, the algorithm is going to learn to do that, too,” Golbeck said. “AI has this veneer of objectivity, but because what it does is replicate our decision-making, it replicates our biases as well.”

Roughly 300,000 international students come to the U.S. annually in pursuit of education.

The challenges they face don’t end with simple homesickness or cultural differences: Without a Social Security number or U.S. credit history, these students face barriers in accessing basic banking services, which in turn make it harder to find an apartment, rent a car or pay for living expenses.

Adro, a New York City-based fintech offering financial services to U.S. newcomers, recently raised $1.5 million in pre-seed funding to address this issue.

CEO and co-founder Amarildo Gjondrekaj caught wind of the issue’s prevalence as a professor at multiple New York area universities.

With a little digging into his contacts in the payments and banking space — he’s a payments vet with nearly seven years at Mastercard and another two at Harness, a nonprofit-focused fintech — Gjondrekaj found the issue at hand was an “information asymmetry problem.”

“Internationals moving in [are accompanied by] all of this data. They're some of the most vetted people on Earth as they get their visas through, but this information just never makes it to anyone else,” he said. “It doesn't make it to the banks. It doesn't make it to the tech companies. It sits with the university. It sits with the State Department on the visa side. There’s this giant information gap.”

Gjondrekaj co-founded Adro with Sara Schmitt, formerly of Amazon and Epic, and Kevin DeArmond, formerly of Uber and Titan, to bridge the gap so that when the student arrives, their accounts can immediately be activated, allowing money to move easily and for them to build a credit file.

Adro partners directly with universities to get international students up to speed 90 days prior to arrival. The schools “have a vested interest in their success ... to make life easier [as] they on-ramp America,” Gjondrekaj said.

International students are a common target for financial scammers, he noted, so the schools and Adro also co-created education materials to arm them against crooks. (Immigration, they inform the students, is never going to call you. Neither will the State Department. Those are scammers.)

Through a partnership with Stearns Bank, Adro can provide students with a debit account and a secure credit product.

“This is an area of focus for them, supporting underserved unmet market needs,” he said of Stearns, adding that they’re “really, really good people to work with” who understand the clients and the compliance component of working with international account holders.

“One of our hero features ... is we're looking to reimburse the international fee of the transfers,” Gjondrekaj said. “We do not want to make money on international cross-border transfers. We're not going to upcharge anything on international transfers, and we're looking to actually reimburse what they pay their banks on a monthly basis back to the consumer.”

“We're trying to be one of the most efficient and effective ways for them to move money into the U.S. in a very, very, very cheap and efficient way,” he said.

Adro also seeks to be a conduit for U.S. newcomers to access other necessary products and services, things Adro won’t be in the business of offering, but will link students to through what it’s dubbing an “international onboarding welcome kit.”

“We know that as you arrive, these are the two dozen things that you may need. You're probably going to need a SIM card, you're probably going to need your first internet at home. You may need renter's insurance,” Gjondrekaj said. “Here are the trusted partners that we have worked with that know this area well that can also work with you even though you don't have an SSN or credit file.”

The pre-seed funding, which was announced in April and led by Era with participation from Ex Nihilo Ventures and the Cornell Tech Syndicate, will go toward hiring engineers, Gjondrekaj said.

He expects internal testing and friends-and-family testing before a July 1 go-live date, ahead of the start of the school year.

Consumers looking for deals often use coupon finders in their browsers to find promotional offers to apply at checkout. Now, Citi wants to be the preferred intermediary through which its cardholders find online discounts and other rewards through a tool it rolled out in late January called Citi Shop.

The Citi Shop browser extension, which can only be used by Citi credit card holders, searches for coupons on eligible merchant checkout pages and suggests applicable codes to apply at checkout. The program can potentially reduce the amount a customer pays and can also activate cash-back offers that are delivered as credits on credit card statements. It includes roughly 5,000 merchants across 30 product categories. 

“We’re not only making it easier for card members to find savings while shopping online but we’re also addressing that finding time is one of the top barriers for consumers looking for a deal,” Anthony Merola, head of proprietary products at Citi branded cards, told Banking Dive.

Citi partnered with fintech Wildfire Systems, a white-label loyalty platform that works with “dozens” of banks and fintech firms, including Royal Bank of Canada, LendingClub and Acorns, to develop Citi Shop, said Shawn Conahan, the company’s chief revenue officer. Citi Ventures, one of Citi’s three venture investing vehicles, invested an undisclosed amount in Wildfire in 2022.

The goal of Citi Shop, according to the bank, is to enhance card members' relationships and trust with the institution and help them save money. These types of programs also boost revenue when bank fees are under pressure, including efforts to limit late fees and credit card interchange, Conahan said.

Citi did not comment on its monetization model, including whether it earns a percentage of each successful Citi Shop transaction that has a cash-back benefit. However, while not referring to Citi specifically, Conahan said banks and fintechs it works with typically take a cut of merchant-funded cash-back-offer pie, which can be 10% of the price of an item, or higher. 

Offers vary by merchant and are not a fixed amount, he clarified, and the company’s merchant development team works with merchants and negotiates offer rates. A portion of the merchant offer is shared with the consumer.

“We take a little off the top and we get to make a business out of that. We give the rest — the lion's share of it —  [to the partner], and then they share that with the consumer, so everyone wins,” he said. 

An ecosystem of browser extensions

Getting into the retail checkout through browser extensions is a natural fit for banks and financial firms that want to learn more about how consumers shop, said Suzy Davidkhanian, a retail analyst at Insider Intelligence. 

In recent years, banks and fintechs have rolled out browser extensions that offer coupon codes and cash-back offers for e-commerce shoppers. 

These include PayPal, which operates PayPal Honey, a digital coupon and price-tracking platform that the payments company acquired for $4 billion in 2020, and Capital One Shopping, a coupon and cash-back platform that stemmed from the bank’s 2018 acquisition of the fintech Wikibuy for an undisclosed amount. (Wikibuy was later rebranded as Capital One Shopping, which finds coupons and cash-back offers for consumers, including those who aren’t Capital One customers.)

“There's all this data that's sitting in credit card behaviors, and monetizing that ... from a financial institution’s perspective, is important for everybody,” Davidkhanian said. “The brands want to know what their customers and potential customers are doing so that they can target them.”

Trends the bank sees from shopping habits, surveys or direct customer feedback “help us elevate the card member experience and bring more impactful solutions,” Merola said.

Wildfire said its toolset does not allow its partners to monetize the data, and Citi confirmed that it’s not monetizing consumer shopping data insights from Citi Shop.

“We decided that we were not going to be a data company,” Conahan said. “We are a fintech [and] we monetize the transaction. We do not sell data.” 

The data play

Some companies in the digital couponing field might be interested in using consumer shopping data — likely aggregated insights — to help partner retailers pitch offers to consumers.

“Institutions have so much data about people's behaviors. I don't think they're going to ever share [individual transaction data], but I think they’re going to be able to say things like ‘People who live in New York go out on Tuesday or Wednesday, and so, if you need them to come to your local restaurant, maybe this is when you target them with an ad or with a coupon or a gift certificate,’” Davidkhanian said.

John Kim, executive vice president and chief product officer at PayPal, suggested financial companies may use aggregated, anonymized insights garnered from shopping tools to help merchants suggest offers to consumers who may be interested in a particular product or service. Network rules and regulation, he said, prevent banks and financial companies from sharing individual-level transaction data with partners.

For Wildfire’s clients, a key motivation is to keep the customer loyal over time, Conahan said.

“It’s 10 times more expensive to acquire a new customer than to keep an existing one, and nothing says I love you like free money,” he said. “What they have realized is that consumers expect these kinds of rewards in exchange for their loyalty.”

Emily Luk and Channing Allen, two fintech pros who fell in love at a company eventually acquired by Walmart, were on sabbatical. They were traveling the world, and going back and forth on an idea born out of their own shared experience — how do we financially plan for a future together, and can we create an app that answers that question for fellow millennials?

“In moments where we’d think, ‘Let's explore other ideas,’ we’d meet another couple and they’d proactively bring up how complicated it was to manage money together or to figure out how much they needed to plan for a house or kids. We kept getting these signals that there were so many people running into the same problem,” Luk said.

The duo heeded those signals and sketched out different drawings of what the product would look or feel like, if they took a crack at developing it.

Now, parts of those sketches are live in Plenty, a wealth-building app geared to help couples manage and invest their money together.

“The other [couple-focused] products we've seen typically focus on expense splitting, which tends to be a much earlier chapter of someone's relationship,” Luk said. “When people start to use our product, they're like, ‘We actually are in a place where we [share expenses]. We don't care about one-off transactions, we're really rounding things at this point.’”

Plenty users connect their financial accounts to the app and choose which accounts to share with their partner.

From there, they’re able to transfer money into Plenty’s cash management product, a managed portfolio of money market funds custodied by BNY Mellon | Pershing that currently offers a 5.1% annual percentage yield, and earmark certain stashes of money to specific shared goals; or into its investment product, which aims to make investing “as simple as possible” for the end user.

“Ultimately, we want to make it as simple as you pressing [a button] and you can immediately deposit $100 and we will manage everything for you,” Luk said.

Millennials, she said, are still at the point in life where investing or saving just 1% more annually can have a huge payoff when retirement rolls around.

Plenty, which is a Securities and Exchange Commission-registered investment adviser, asks its users a few simple questions: What are your goals? Do you want to buy a house in five years, or are you focused on saving for retirement? Additionally, what are your values?

Most people don’t realize where their current 401(k) is being invested in, Luk said.

“Your retirement account could actually be invested in a payday lender. You would never invest in a payday lender, but [investment management firms] are some of the biggest investors in the payday lending space in America. They're also some of the largest investors in for-profit prisons,” she said.

Plenty users declare their values — for example, saying ‘yes’ to investing in tobacco companies, but ‘no’ to investing in companies that engage in animal testing — and the program creates a customized portfolio to align with those values.

Currently, Plenty is invite-only, and Luk wouldn’t divulge how many users it had. But it will be available to the public in the first half of this year, for at $200 per year per couple or $150 per year for a single user.

Bucking the trend

According to The Future of Fintech, a report released earlier this month by Forrester, the current landscape for business-to-consumer fintechs like Plenty is a challenging one.

“The days of neobanks’ splashy launches, massive hype, and blitzscaling are over. In fact, B2C fintech firms as a whole face more adversity than they have since the dawn of fintech: As one fintech founder quipped, ‘Friends don't let friends make B2C startups,’” Forrester wrote.

Luk — whose product is, of course, B2C — doesn’t disagree.

“Both Channing and I have always been pretty strong first principles thinkers, and if someone’s like, ‘I'm going to start a B2C fintech’, the first thing I would tell them is, ‘No one needs another debit card. No one needs another checking account. And if the product isn't different, I wouldn't do it,’” she said.

“We've made really key decisions from the very beginning [that have made] our product different,” she said. “It serves unique functionality you can't get elsewhere for a demographic that, largely, people have missed – people have missed the fact that there are so many people managing money with another individual,” she said.

She noted that many of the original joint-investment products on the market and even some popular joint credit cards weren’t built for both partners to have equal access to managing those investments.

”We came in from the very beginning knowing that there were a set of key architectural decisions that would be really important to build a multiplayer functionality. That's really different than if you had not planned to build it and now you're trying to build it after the fact,” she said.

Novo, a financial solutions platform for small businesses, launched Novo Payroll, which allows any of its customers to run payroll directly from a checking account.

The new solution that rolled out in January is powered by Check, a payroll infrastructure company that developed the product using its payroll application programming interface. Novo Payroll is fully integrated into the fintech’s small business banking platform, streamlining the payroll process in an effort to both save time and ensure regulatory compliance.

“Traditional small business payroll solutions consist of standalone applications characterized by high fees, burdensome cash-on-hand requirements, and either clunky or non-existent integrations between payroll and business bank accounts,” Michael Rangel, founder and CEO of Novo, said in a statement. “In collaboration with Check, we built a payroll solution that simplifies and speeds up the process of paying small business employees.”

Novo Payroll is a brand new product that complements and expands the fintech’s platform, Brad Paterson, EVP of marketing and partnership at Novo, told Banking Dive.

He added that Novo received feedback from its customers, primarily small business owners, that they were worried about complying with several payroll taxes and laws, which vary across the 50 states. They were also paying high fees for the services to process their workers’ payroll.

“There’s a number of payroll options in the market today. Very few are built for small business owners; most are built for more medium-sized businesses and above, which means that they’re charging exorbitant prices,” Paterson said. “We’ve managed to build a product that is streamlined in partnership with Check that does everything a customer needs, allows him to be 100% compliant, but at a fraction of the cost.”

Novo will offer all the essential features of the new product, including tax filing and end of year reports, at $35 per month with an additional fee per worker, the company said.

Through Novo Payroll, small businesses that need additional funds to run a payroll cycle can apply for Novo Funding and, once approved, use the capital immediately.

In August, the Miami-based company received a $125 million facility from Victory Park Capital to provide its customers with working capital through Novo Funding, which gives small businesses a fast and flexible way to access the capital.

Customers using Novo Payroll can contact the support team to get answers to any questions they have about payroll. According to the company, recipients can also receive their paychecks the next day after their payroll is processed at no extra cost.

Novo Payroll, available across 50 states, automates tax filings for small businesses with employees in a single state and multiple states.

“You do still have to file your own business taxes later on; that’s separate, but we do all of the initial withholding and reporting, and that’s what you expect of a payroll company,” Andrew Brown, co-founder and CEO of Check, told Banking Dive. “With Novo [Payroll] powered by Check, you just get the forms directly in the application. You download them, and it’s super simple to then pass those to your business tax filing solution.”

Novo has conducted a beta of the new tool and will make the product available to its customers in the coming weeks. But for now, customers can join the waitlist, which is a way for the company to ensure they get what they need, Paterson clarified.

The launch is also well-timed, he noted, since many small business owners are reassessing their payroll options at the beginning of the year.

“We realized that launching just after peak season was important. There are a number of small business owners making payroll decisions in January and February,” he said. “We have now well over 200,000 small business customers on our platform. Being able to offer it to the right customers at the right time was important, and we needed to move fast as well, [which] we were able to do with Check.”