 Fantastic. I'd like to welcome everybody to the independent investor channel. I've got a special guest here, Mr. Brian Barnes, CEO of M1 Finance. He's been part of the independent investor community now for a couple years, but this is his exclusive debut. Brian, thank you so much for taking time out of your busy schedule. Just the floor is yours. Please take this opportunity and introduce yourself and let us know what you got going on there at M1 Finance. Yeah, well, first of all, really appreciate you having me on. That's great to connect with your community. So I'm the founder and CEO of M1. I started the company about five and a half years ago, and we are a personal finance platform that combines the best of digital investing, digital borrowing and digital banking into one comprehensive application. The company now serves a little over half a million users managing $4 billion, and it's across three of our main products. So we have M1 Invest, which is free automated investing in a custom soccer ETF portfolio. We have M1 Borrow, which is a portfolio line of credit that lets you borrow using your portfolio's collateral at rates as low as 2%. And we have M1 Spend, which is a integrated checking account that provides a high yield on your cash balances as well as cash back through an M1 card. And the M1 really focuses on the personalized and automation of money management. So how can your dollars be put to the best, maximal use for you individually? And we have a very intuitive way to set that up for yourself. I think one thing in engaging with my community, Brian, is you've made investing fun. You really have. I think for a lot of people, the barriers to entry to investing are just too much. And I just want to thank you and your team's efforts and blowing down a lot of those barriers and making investing a lot more accessible. Because I can tell you what, Brian, your platform is in the hands of our truck drivers, our electricians, our tradesmen, who are out there working day to day jobs and may not have that much access to a broker. And M1 really does make that access that much more achievable for people. And I just want to commend you on those efforts. If you wouldn't mind, Brian, just talking a little bit about the customer itself. Would you mind just kind of talking about your customer retention? Because what I talk about with my community is how sticky M1 finance is, which it is. And then kind of the customer demographic, if you would, like who's M1 for? Is it for everybody or is it for a certain demographic? If you wouldn't mind, that'd be great. Yeah, absolutely. So a couple ways to frame this. I would say the nice thing about M1 is it does have a spectrum of wealth that you can have and overall sophistication that you can have. I would say first and foremost, we are for people who think long term about their money. So they're not trying to trade and play earnings that are, you're buying something on Tuesday, selling on Thursday or even buying or selling intraday. It's much more about systematically investing in the things that you know and understand over long periods of time. And what you're trying to do is build ownership stakes, rather than play the price fluctuations. You're saying, you know, I want to invest in this security because over long periods of time it will become more valuable and I want an ownership stake in that, as opposed to on Thursday, I think people will pay me more for it. So we have a lot of a long term perspective. And then I do think there is a element of self directed or you want to make choices yourself. And so M1 is not a, you know, hand it to a mutual fund, hand it to an advisor and have them make the decision. It really does put you in the driver's seat. The software just automates your decisions that you make. And so it makes it easier to do what you intend to do with your money. In terms of the platform, the nice thing about it is it sort of abstracts away how much money you have and it's design your portfolio on a percentage basis. Tell me, you know, say if I have my entire portfolio I want 10% of my money to be in this investment, I want 15% of my money to be in that investment. I want 25 to be in this collection of investments. And therefore it doesn't matter if you're putting $100 to work or a million dollars to work, you can just add that amount and it all goes to work for free. Think about investing. There is sort of the one time you do something of you, you make the investment, but most people are trying to save a little bit with their paycheck every two weeks. And so they have a small amount of incremental capital to put to work and they want to put that to work and the things that they know and understand. And that's what M1 really allows you to do is say, you know, I want $100 with my paycheck every two weeks, $500 with my paycheck every two weeks, $5 with my paycheck every two weeks. Really whatever amount works for the individual and that money will automatically go into the investments you want. It'll be intelligently directed towards where it can be best used based on how your portfolio is performing. We will use fractional shares so 100% of the money goes to work and so it's your money's just always backed by what you want it to be backed by. And that is really what we're trying to do is, you know, people who are systematically saving and investing for their future we just want to make it as seamless as intuitive and it's frictionless and low cost as possible. And from a demographic I mean we really do run the spectrum I mean we have the $100 is the minimum account value so you know people can start with $100 we have accounts in eight figures so in excess of $10 million on the platform. We have people who are 18 years old we actually have custodial accounts and so we can have a you know two year old child and they could have an account on the platform but you know, at any age, I would say we probably center around people who are. I don't know mid 20s to mid 40s is probably where the bulk of our user race is, and it really does run the spectrum of people who are just getting started investing for the first time to people who are quite robust and sophisticated in their platform they just want to software to really help them on their ongoing money management. You're doing more than just helping people Brian I really do I want to foot stomp what you're talking about when that $100 flows in there. And there's nothing that the investor needs to do with them one finance it's already portfolio distributed across the holdings and when you talked about structuring the portfolio. You guys have really broken down a lot of barriers whereas traditionally you kind of had to start with a blank palette and construct a portfolio. You know, where do you start, you know, do you buy five shares of AT&T do you buy five shares of of Pfizer with them one finance it's almost as if you start at the end of the finish line. And you run the race backwards and you say here's the framework of my portfolio. Here's how I want it structured and the money really doesn't matter. You can just kind of say hey I want to have my ETFs over here and my single stock over here. And I just think that cannot be overstated how you guys have blown down barriers that just up to about five years ago before you guys got here were insurmountable for a lot of investors so I commend your efforts Brian I really do. Can you talk a little bit about you mentioned fractional shares. Footstomp that a little bit, kind of talk about how that makes them one finance unique because there are other platforms now doing fractional shares, but not quite the way that you guys do it. I'm really looking to do fractional shares because you guys were the pioneers in this space. And I can't tell you how important that is to the unique aspect of M one finance and I think that's going to be a big part of your staying power, going forward. But if you wouldn't mind just talking about the unique perspective of the fractional shares and the portfolio redistribution of funds if you don't mind Brian that's key to your success. I mean, even if we start, you know, further back of you know sort of like original broker days. It used to be insanely expensive people would charge sort of one 2% of the amount you were investing each way and you did have to buy in what was called even lots and so that's in blocks of 100 shares. And so you know it became prohibitively expensive for anybody to participate with the exception of the ultra wealthy. And then I think over time you sort of got a breakdown where it's, you didn't have to buy in even lots you could buy 67 shares, and you know that that's a little bit more flexible for people it's, you know smaller sums of money to put to work each time. And then commissions went from you know, one or 2% to 20 bucks a trade to 10 bucks a trade to five bucks a trade to free. And what you're seeing now is with fractional shares, you can put any dollar amount in any security. You know, there are the infamous high price securities of Google and Amazon the trade for thousands of dollars a share. And it's regard even if you have a lot of money to investing in like discrete you know $2,600 increments is it's just a lot of money to put to work at any given time. And it makes it so that you sort of accumulate cash until you have enough cash and then, then you all put, then you put it all to work. And so you just sit on the sidelines and then you like develop enough. And when everything's digital, that doesn't really make sense you know it everything's just an entry in a database it doesn't matter if you own 0.08456 shares or 1.2 or 10,000. It's really all the same it's just an electronic transaction to do it and so with M one we've always started from a principle of you should be able to invest any dollar amount in any investment security that exists out there so that that's why we went with fractional shares. So that M one is is quite different than the other players that you've mentioned is mostly other players still do require manual trade input and so every single time you want to buy or sell something, you have to manually go in click the buttons and do that. It's fine but it just becomes cumbersome it becomes time intensive and you know you have to transfer the money wait for it to settle do all that kind of stuff. And since M one really says, let's look at the portfolio you want to have, and by default, we're going to make that portfolio happen without you having to do anything and so it's it's as easy as depositing $500 in a savings account it's just the $500 goes to work in the investment securities that you want. And we have a algorithm that we employ that sort of surveys how your portfolio is doing relative to what you want it to do to direct the money towards where it could be best used and so it's. Anytime money comes in or out of the platform it's just adapting where it could be used in your custom plan. It's incredible. It's incredible. I've got a pretty wide ranging reach here Brian and I know you've been asked this before, but I have to ask it on behalf of my international community. You know where I'm going with this. I probably know the answer but but I would like, I would like them to hear it from you about how difficult that is. If there's any hope at all of reaching beyond the US borders for international customers. So, unfortunately, this decision is driven less by us and is driven more by regulators that as a financial institution we have a lot of compliance rules to adhere to. So I think that you start doing international money transfers, the cost of compliance just skyrockets, pretty dramatically and so it really has to do with a resource and a bandwidth issue in compliance with the rules and regulations that we would need to adhere to. You know, that is the justification I would absolutely love to open up and one to the entire world and have anybody use it it is much more of a, you know, like where we are as a company, our maturation stage as well as all the things that we would need to do to comply with the financial and securities regulation for taking international money. We will absolutely get there at some point and so you know M one has achieved massive growth has been fortunate to raise a significant amount of fundraising our team. Over the last six months we've gone from 70 employees to 180 employees and so I mean we've massively increased the team and so we have the ability and bandwidth to pursue a lot of these initiatives and we will start deploying against it. It's just unfortunately not a flip of the switch type change that we can make it's a it's a, you know, it's a multi year expensive bill to to be able to support people from outside the United States. I can honestly you know the pulse of social media and YouTube, I mean I'm pulsed into some pretty real data with real people and I can tell you there's a lot of people from a lot of countries out there that are that are waiting for that day and they'll be the first to sign up to Canada UK, especially some folks that tell us how lucky that we are. I appreciate that. If you wouldn't mind Brian just kind of walk me through I sat on a round table with one of your competitors I won't name names. What I will say, they prided themselves on being somewhat of a passive platform, and I caught my attention because I thought, in ones kind of the dominant player in that space, you know, do you have any data or analytics to show how I said your platform is sticky. And I meant that to be the biggest compliment to you because in investing it's time in the market, not timing the market, do you have data that supports that customer tendency to show that once you bring a customer in house that they stay with you guys, and that they're satisfied with the platform. Absolutely. So, this is one of the things that gets our VC investors quite excited is we have some of the best retention and like asset growth that people have really ever seen in the FinTech industry and so really when someone signs up for the M1 platform their balance is close to zero. You know, they might put the $100 on the $1,000 on whatever it may be to get started. Over the course of a year, our average income balance grows to 25,000. And after two years it's closer to 40,000 and so people are putting meaningful amounts of money onto the platform and then the typical path of how that like money increases is people try out the platform where a newer platform and so Schwab has more grand prestige than M1 does currently. We'll see where things go in 5, 10 years but you know they might have a quarter million dollars at Schwab and they sign up with M1 and they put $100 on then $1,000 on then $5,000 on then they remove 3,000 to make sure that it comes back to their bank account. And then after they get comfort and say hey this M1 platform is more intuitive, it's easier to use, it resonates more with me as an investor, it's lower cost, all of the things that you want with sort of the principles of money management. That's when they bring their quarter million dollar Schwab account over and so that is really what buoys the asset growth in a very meaningful capacity. And so, you know, every month our cohorts are the group of people who are signing up on a month to month basis gets larger and larger, and all the existing people continue to grow on the platform and have recurring deposits, you know, frequently fund and stay with the platform so we are very happy with the premise that we've built for is long term systematic investing and that's exactly what people are doing on the platform. I would say that I'm one of those. I'm a little more active and some of my other accounts Brian but I can contribute a lot of my discipline I always say that M1 finance has discipline baked into it. You know, and it almost appears as if, you know, I want to I want to look at my accounts with M1 finance and monitor them, but I don't want to touch them. I want to retain that secret sauce of M1 finance being passive and nature and I, I think a lot of people also resonate with that idea is that if we can get them used to the idea of passive investing, right, because you are not an active platform. Let's let's that's worth repeating you. You are absolutely a passive platform and it's conducive for those investors that want to enjoy the passive aspect of their program. You spoke about just sorry just what one like clarification. So I agree there's, I think there's sort of two forms of this active and passive debate and just sort of where we sit in. One is the, you know, infrequent trading versus very frequent trading and we definitely go to the infrequent trading like the only reason you place a trade is to buy ownership. It's not to play price movements and so that we take that mentality, but then there's also an active versus passive debate of how much should you be involved in selecting the investments that constitute your portfolio and so there are some that should only be in a Vanguard ETF there are some that you know say you should pick anything and everything. And I think where M1 falls on that is you should have as much control as you feel comfortable having it. You know, if you want the passive in like the index ETF form of the world, absolutely support that we will do that and do that if you do have a perspective and say I want to own this security for any given reason you know I have allegiance to the brand I think it's undervalued I think it's going to increase in value over time, you have as much customization as you feel comfortable having and so we really talk about it as it's sort of active selection but passive management. And the reason for that is active selection is, it's your money you should do with it what you want. The passive management is big, you know, if you take an Apple, Apple's true value does not change between Tuesday and Thursday. This price may move a little bit, but it's value doesn't. And really what you're trying to do is if you're buying Apple you're doing it. The real reason you should be doing it is, you think this company in the underlying intrinsic value is going to become more valuable over time, and you want an ownership sake in that, and you want to appreciate with that and compounding helps, not being a frequent trader and having all the tax consequences help and so we, you know, we sort of merge that thing of active selection passive management is really how we think about things. Now I think it's brilliant I really do and you mentioned to some of the accounts are coming over and they're starting with zero or $100 and they're testing the water with you guys. I've had a lot so I just want to earmark that I get that pulse through the community and are these guys for real. You guys are absolutely for real. I do want to touch on something Brian if you don't mind the one thing I've already talked about but the second thing I want to hear from your perspective to my audience is about customer service. Okay, any improvements that you're making as far as you guys haven't been around that long. Okay. And when you're talking about people's money and you know bringing that account over conduits like myself can really help because I can say look here's a testimonial I use the platform here it is. Here's real dollars to work I think that helps bridge a little gap, but customer service is important it really is and I was hoping that maybe you could shed some light on maybe some of the initiatives that you're taking at M one on that front. Yeah, so this is an area where we have not done as well as we want to do nor like should do and I would say, I've said it before it's 100% a me on the bandwidth problem, not as a result of our customer support reps our customer support we come into every day wanting our users to have a phenomenal money management experience, and they work insanely hard to make that happen. And they're just a little underwater due to truthful, like a little bit of our growth that has happened that it's not the. Good and bad statistics that, you know, last January, we had 40 employees and we signed up more brokerage accounts than E trade did in the month of January, which and they have 4000 employees and so we were a little underwater then and this January compared to last January, I believe we signed up 10x more accounts and so, you know, the, a little bit of this is we are trying to, to continue to build a best in class investing platform, support everything that exists and plan for the future, all simultaneously and at times of extreme growth, it stresses our operational capacity to service that a little bit. We have, if we talk about the company prior to 2020 we have raised $25 million in the last 12 months we've raised another 150 so we've raised six times the amount of money that we had raised in the previous five years combined. All of that is going to personnel improvements technology improvements, you know just adding more bandwidth and capacity to absorb all this, just making issues that cost customer support issues come up happen far less frequently. We've invested in technology on the customer support side from, you know, chatbots phone better phone systems better ticketing management systems where we've increased the customer support team by 10 fold year over year. This is something that we are very acutely aware of and something that we are putting massive resources behind, and something that all of our customer experience like the, all of our customers should be experiencing significantly better customer support than they've ever had with M one, and it's only going to continue to get better that I think in, you know, a year, like in a short amount of time it will meaningfully improve but I think in, you know, a year or two I think we will be head to head if not better than any of the sort of peer competitors set of our more established players of Fidelity Schwab, Meritrade E-Train, you know any of the banks out there and so this is something we are very heavily investing behind and have a big concerted effort from the entire company to to improve. I just think it's part of the ecosystem, Brian, right the people like myself who are part of the M one ecosystem, the customer service pieces is huge now I don't rely on customer service. I'm a pretty savvy fellow I can take care of a lot myself but there's a lot of people out there that may not even understand the very question that they have, and they just want to talk to them and I, I don't want to give full credit to the big brokers out there you know their customer service isn't top notch either. What I would charge you guys with that M one finance man is to keep everything within that M one finance ecosystem. You know, be proud of the product that you make and a lot of the questions that I get about M one or how to use this or how to walk through this or how to build a slice and I know there's tutorials out there. Just to pick up the phone and have somebody on the other end for somebody who's 55 years old and is starting M one finance for the first time, they may miss out on the ecosystem if we don't get that piece right. And I really want to, I appreciate your, your candid response to the responsibility. I know five years goes by fast and you know you guys are growing fast man. Yeah, it's a it's a it's a blink of the eye, you know, and yeah five years and a lot of that was with a much smaller company and then we have now and so the the pace of improvements will dramatically increase as as time goes on and the thing that I would say, culturally, everyone who works at M one is incredibly brought into improving the personal finance experience we are trying to build a tool to empower people to better manage their finances that's ultimately what we come in and work on day in and day out. And it's, we think of that in terms of every single touch point that the customer has with M one whether that's logging into the product and the usability, the interface, the easiness at which you can do various things, whether you reach out to customer support and talk with someone via chat via email via on the phone, but I would say, culturally, we have 100% of the right foundation and principles, we now have the resources to really make it. We execute against those and really make it the best and most premier personal finance platform on the market. This guy's the limit for you guys. There's no doubt about it. I'm your I'm your staunchest advocate because I'm a user the platform and I'm, I'm a little bit old school man I'm 43 years old so when I speak to investors I can reach back into that old school, what we had to go through with managed trades and you know the cost of entry to investing and I when you guys came around it was like man alive you guys revolutionized on a lot of different, different platforms. Where did the idea of M one finance come from. I was managing my own money that I was introduced to finance at a pretty early age and was just like a little personal finance nerd from, from, you know, middle school high school into college. And so I thought investing was incredibly fun and captivating that you're trying to figure out what a company's worth in a very nebulous world and make a high conviction decision behind it and if you're right you made money if you're wrong you lost money so that that was just a very like fun intellectual and it was really looking at the the platforms of the online directed brokerage and it looked like you had a, you know, airplane cockpit terminal of the amount of things that you could do the information that was shown to you. And ultimately I would download all the things into an Excel thing output the trades that I wanted to make do all the interactions and I said, This is what software is for you should be able to tell software. This is what I want to do and just make it happen until you I tell you to do something different. And so it was really that, you know, it can be investing as a whole can be simpler. It's just what part of your money do you want to go into what investment and software can handle the administrative aspects and then like advances on consumer applications and design it. We can show you the amount of information that you want at any given level so at the highest level you can sort of see a holistic picture. If you want to dig in you can sort of just like drill down and just see all the information that you want at any given level and so you can build that confidence and comfort and like without having it just be a, you know, like finance out for finance people designed, you know, 40 years ago and never improved so I think that that the ethos for m one was really this is how I wanted my money management of simple intuitive low cost automated and really just trying to carry those principles as we built the application. I almost had you say investing is fun. I almost had you say it man I want you to say it on this. I love investing. I will say that as many times as you want me to. I do to I tell you but the barriers to entry for a lot of our old school folks you know like myself, I mean we really had to fight a lot. Again the cost of entry man these new folks I told people this has never been a better time to be an investor. You know, made in large part my platforms like M one finance man, it's incredible. Any improvements to the desktop or and or the mobile app that you can speak of now Brian just as an update. You know, like I said we're, you know 10 x in the customer support team we've also was probably four or five x the product development team and so any aspect of the application will be seeing meaningful improvements and so we've bucketed it into, you know, the you know and spend our sort of core pillars there's a platform team there's a growth team and so all of these people are working diligently to fine tune create new features and the like. I would say we're going deeper in each so there will be more investing options, more borrowing options, more spend options we've mentioned it before but a credit card is on the horizon and the credit card will be quite unique in the marketplace. We are moving to a holistic financial platform so you come to M one to manage your money as opposed to one component of your finances whether it's, you know the investments or your spend account but you really say this is what I used to manage my money holistically. It feels like one platform so it doesn't feel like it's you know, eight different products under the same brand umbrella that you know, for lack of I don't integrate don't work together. And like it's going to feel like one M one application is just your money is optimized across how you invest borrow and spend your money and very intuitive ways. Like Brian I've taken 10 minutes of your bonus time, but in closing, I would just like to say, look, thank you so much on behalf of the independent investor community. Thank you for your time number one number two I do just want to mention that the independent investor channel is proudly affiliated with M one finance. We roll out just about on the nose weekly tutorials. So if you're interested in finding out more about, you know jumping in and taking a look this never used to be as accessible as it was 10 years ago where you could jump in and actually see real money to work. If you if you want to see that and see how an investor like myself is a product user man I love your platform I really do and I'll say it. You know twice on Sunday man it makes investing fun it really does Brian so for the last word man the floor is yours but I just want to thank you for your time on behalf of the channel and it's an open door policy you've been here in spirit for two years man but it's finally nice to actually have you on the channel for the first time man. No, I mean, you know, thank you for helping spread the word thank you to the community for everyone who has signed up and used M one. We are, I think we have done a lot we've created a lot but I think we are at the beginning of everything that's possible and one and so you people should be expecting meaningful improvements across the entire board and can commit to that whether it's, whether it's customer support or the product experience. As they have feedback we we love to hear constructive feedback, you know, maybe not getting yelled at but you know I mean any constructive feedback on things that help you manage your finances better help you, like, think of things get you more comfortable get you and we're always looking for ways to improve and so there's a lot of different avenues for that we have our review stores you can email me my email is just Brian at M one finance calm. You can, we have a product submission format so we love to hear from our user base and are super thankful that people are entrusting their money with us. You're on the front of the wave man stay there Brian I think the sky is the limit for you guys and it's just proud to be a product owner and an ambassador of your product Brian thank you so much for your time I really appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you.