 This is start-up star friend. Let me give you a scenario. You try and purchase something on your debit card But you don't have enough money in your account Instead of declining the purchase your bank allows it to go through and charges you $35 for the convenience overdraft fees accounted for 5.8 billion dollars of bank revenue in the first three quarters of 2022 These fees harm millions of Americans every year and they can trap people into a cycle of debt Jason Wilk the founder of Dave also struggled with these fees What frustrated him the most was that if the bank just looked at his recent transaction history They would be able to see a scheduled paycheck coming in in only a couple of days and in that frustration Dave was born Dave is an online bank that offers no interest loans based on your transaction history in order to avoid overdraft fees in Today's episode we discussed with Jason about how Mark Cuban invested in Jason's first company only to cap his salary at $30,000 per year going from the euphoria of an IPO to watching the stock price tumble a few days later And what it was like transitioning from the CEO of a privately traded company to a publicly traded one All right, welcome to the podcast on today's show. We're talking to Jason CEO Dave. Thanks for joining. Yeah. Thanks for having me People who don't know what's Dave Dave is one of the leading neobanks in the country You know bank neobank is a digital bank with no bank branches. Okay, so we sort of find it Okay, and we don't have a bank license. We partner with a bank to hold our deposits So that's what separates a bank from a neobank But the benefit of us is we're digitally focused and our cost structure compared to major banks is so Limited which allows it to offer products at significantly cheaper prices than incumbents when you started the company What was the idea? Like what did you see? What was the problem you were trying to solve? Yeah for this very simple overdraft fees Okay, they suck today. They still suck They suck all the time major banks still charge thirty four dollars for taking your account negative for every instance So you can still get charged at JP Morgan Chase a hundred bucks a day for oh, wow having a negative balance What what are these banks collectively taking overdraft fees? Like how big is that? It's been reduced over the years especially since companies like us have come out trying to disrupt the industry It's still shockingly large. It's like 15 to 20 billion dollars a year of just an overdraft fees Just crazy, and you figure that's affecting the lowest income earners of the population the most right? Yeah It's roughly 80% of the people that are paying overdraft fees are comprised of the majority of the fees All right, so you so you saw this in the market you go, okay cool overdraft fees. Let's fix it Yeah, well, I was I was the overdrafter so I had the personal experience And I knew it was something that could be disrupted. Were you in college or hold or just out of college? How I had the idea during college But it really became a lot more prevalent when I had my my second company that It was a white combinator backed business and Mark Cuban was our lead investor and started this company It's called all-screen TV and the idea was that Factually help media companies distribute their online video content to other small websites So if I'm CNN I can take my digital video content and give it to local news comm and then give a rev share basis So it was a great model for helping people drive more views and everybody sort of won in the model But started the business in 2009 when we're just coming out of the yeah financial crisis Very hard to raise funding. We didn't have this crazy Unicorns Investment environment that we have had the last ten years and it was a real fight to get anyone to invest I fortunately had been introduced to mark Cuban a couple years prior to that at a conference And this is pre shark tank So he was still kind of getting his feet wet in in investing but I knew for some reason I had this like a lot in common with this guy really was there inspired by him and Email him a bunch to try and get him to invest in the company the criteria from to invest He's like all right this kid's hustler And I'm not sure if I love this idea or not, but I'm gonna give him a shot But I'm gonna cap his salary at $30,000 a year. He capped your salary until the company gets profitable so So absurd. Yeah, and I was living in San Francisco at the time, too Can you disclose that I think I can disclose you put 300k in total in the business and he capped you at 30 Yeah, that's crazy cap me at 30k. Okay, and you were okay with that. Obviously he ran this by you. You were like, I'm in I had no other choice. Yeah, he was that I really wanted you wander. He was an investor. Yeah, I was young So I didn't need a lot to live off of Mark himself got his start living off of couches. And so I'm like, yeah, you know sign me up. If I get mark human's name Associated with my it's worth it to have this cap salary and we'll get the company Profitable and it taught us a lot of discipline Early on I had a co-founder too who okay was also kept at $30,000 Well, unfortunately, unfortunately it led to us both getting hit with a lot of overdraft fees and that stuck with us All the way through to the next company. So it was a great discipline for us to get profitable the company We ended up selling it in 2015. We had like 7 million in cash flow in our final year in 2015 So like while the profitable we never raised a cent of venture capital beyond What we raised from Mark and a couple other people in that early around. So it was a good early lesson in Profitability keeping companies lean and I tried to carry as much as that through to building Dave So how how many years are you at 30k? We were at 30k probably for the first three years And then we finally started turning your profit and then Mark must love you. He must be like, this is amazing Yeah, he was figured it out. You did it. He was loving the profitability. You sold for a successful exit I imagine we did. Yeah, we only raised one round of funding. We sold for 85 million That's amazing five five or six years later and Again at the time the company was very profitable. Yeah, so we did it looking back on that story We can get a day of a second, but if you you invest the companies Yeah, yeah, okay So would you ever do the same thing? Would you ever cap them at a obviously not 30,000? Maybe it's 50,000 or 60,000. Would you do the same play? It's just changed so much now. We're Yeah, back then like we raised money like a million dollar valuation That was like a huge wild success in 2009 now. You're raising funding at 10 million $20 million guys are taking secondary There's just so much money flying around over the last decade since we were in that that frame of mind And I don't think you could pull it off as an investor today At least not into any kind of company that has trajectory or any kind of progress so far. Yeah All right, so then you go into Dave and Mark doubles down with you. Yeah. Yeah, yeah Yeah, from the jump more like take, you know, he's playing with house money at this point But he liked the idea because he himself was an overdraft or when he was in school And even when he was getting to start as an entrepreneur I think Mark was like a bartender living on couches and also hated overdraft What year was this when you started it Dave? We so started that in 2016 is when we started like ideating on What's the product to bring to market that we could help and what year did you sell all screen 2015? Okay, 20 20 I remember like in Boston so during opening day in Boston if you go in your college student There's all the banks are there's the Bank of America and they give you tickets So if you open up an account, they'll give you two tickets to the game like opening day and and it's free But if you're not a college student, so if you don't have a college and ID I think just to open the account is like $35. I think it's $35 just to open the account Not an overdraft fee and I was like, this is so absurd like I'm giving you my money It just and giving you money on top of it Also, it's like know your market like the college kid is about to just drop $35 to open up for the luxury of none It doesn't exist. Yeah, that's right. So such a weird, okay So you saw this mark saw you I get the overdraft fee makes sense Yeah, we both saw it and the vision was what we want to go out and compete with these major banks And I want a name that's gonna be very approachable that has this kind of fighter mentality with it And so we came up with the name Dave or kind of like Dave vs. Goliath But we're also this casual name that's very approachable compared to these big fancy bank names So that was the genesis of why the company was called Dave like no one way my family named Dave It just seemed like the right thing to call it Dave.com were there other iterations that you played with no That was it. Okay. Yeah, we wanted the name Dave We spent a good amount of money buying Dave calm early on who owned it But was it like a pet store? I think there was like Dave's pet city where I grew up There was a guy named Dave in San Francisco. He had owned the name like a domain squatting since the since the 90s and It was just like a like a 404 landing page But there was an email address to try and contact him Cinema does it knows never responded it started firing off offers in the in the email as well He finally responded and I wanted to raise I wanted to buy the domain before we raised funding and you guys You know, I saw who our investors were and so ended up buying it for like a hundred and twenty thousand bucks Wow And I think I think he thought those were like a deal I think it's probably pretty fair at the time and like who else is gonna come in and buy That besides Dave and bosses or something I think they were already happy with their domain name, right? So now you start the company and it's 2015 you go 16 16 you go app-based. That seems obvious at that time Yeah, do you also have an online? Is it now? No, just all at based from day one. Okay, and then Your target demo you felt was you or I guess like the younger college maybe post college student Exactly, that's the person. That's right. And then how do you go about getting them? Is it as simple as you go to the colleges and you set up booths or is it? What no well so much of today's success and direct to consumer especially for app-based companies They're all sort of such a hit-striven business, you know within a couple weeks If you have product market fit based on Facebook Instagram Google advertising a little like is this thing gonna have scale and is it gonna have any kind of word of mouth associated with it you can test all that stuff pretty pretty quickly the hypothesis we had was that We all we knew we ultimately wanted to be a full-on digital bank account for customers but very expensive to acquire people into a checking account and people don't Wake up in the morning excited to open up a brand-new checking account That's why banks have to pay so much money to people to open an account so we took a very different approach approach much more like a Trojan horse idea where Dave was an app that would monitor your existing bank account for potential overdraft We would send you a notification and as opposed to you going negative on your Chaser Wells Fargo account and say hey Diego you have a Netflix bill coming up That's gonna take your account negative by $35. That's gonna cost you 34 bucks or you can take an advance from Dave No interest no credit check. We look at your Wells Fargo transaction data to approve you And basically can offer you this money at little to no cost. That's amazing and the reason we thought that would work is It was always upsetting to me that I would bank with Chase or Wells for years. They know where I work. They know my transaction history Why do I have to charge me a $34 fee when they know I'm gonna get paid on Friday? I've been a little customer for 13 years, so it seems crazy to charge that fee So our hypothesis was look we're gonna look at that transaction data We can pretty in pretty quickly tell through a machine learning model when your next paycheck date is and how much it's gonna be and Offer that at no interest and rely instead of on fees. Let people tip us was the the early idea there So you could pay what you think is fair for the amount of money that you borrow So if I give you a hundred bucks, you could tip me two or three dollars $0 So how many people so this reminds me of something not really related But like when Radiohead came out with their in Rainbows album They allowed it whatever pay whatever you wanted yep And most people assumed that they just get it for free and for a large chunk of consumers That was true, but what shocked? I think the music industry was that most people ended up paying something for the album Is that what you found with the tipping is that even though most people could pay zero? Did most people end up giving you money because they were grateful for the offer? Yeah, look it listen now Radiohead was definitely an early inspiration for the tip model We'd also seen the tipping model work well in Asia with with gaming companies and and with social media type type situations Plus tipping in general just seem to be entering the culture a little bit more aggressively So you're used to tipping your Uber driver your barista on all that so why not tip an app that's giving you free money? That would seem to be a pretty good opportunity to grab a tip much better and more user-aligned than Saying hey this is gonna cost you you know five bucks or ten bucks and customers love that and still today I mean about half of our customers tip which is which is great. That's absurd That's let me ask you a different question when it comes to just because you're probably an expert in this when it comes to The bank system in general. Why do you think these banks charge an overdraft? Do you think it's them signaling? We don't really care about you or like what do you think it is? Cuz obviously they have to look at it and go this makes at some point. There's a high friction They're adding a high friction. Sure. Is that on is that intentional a lot of it has to do with their heavy crop cost structure So these guys are supporting 10,000 bank branches JPMorgan Chase has 300,000 employees like they are just an overhead just a massive overhead Okay, and the customers that are paying the most and over Jeff ease just happen to be driving the least amount of probably overall bank revenue from loans credit cards other Areas that they want to make money from so for them to profitably serve This customer base of younger consumers page-to-page at consumers, which is the majority of the country. They have to charge these crazy fees and Unless you have a way to drive revenue elsewhere They have to charge charge the fee because Dave is a technology forward company We can service 8 million customers only 300 employees. So 8 million customers 300 employees or you know 300,000 employees that alone like forget all the innovations. We've had around underwriting technology The just the cost difference alone allows us to offer better products at cheaper cost Yeah, that makes a lot of sense like at what point did you see feet like feel the inflection point of okay? We tested it we Trojan horse did we have X amount of users? Maybe the thousand years maybe less and then you can start offering them the Dave Like the full service I guess are the full suite. Yeah, so that took us. Let's see. So we launched April 2017 We had product market fit almost right away I mean our cac was like five bucks to acquire a consumer and that was one of the big Import milestones for us to prove out like can this be a very low Cost way to acquire users versus we know banks are paying three to four hundred dollars to acquire a regular checking account user So that alone was really powerful and we knew we had something we can go invest invest buying Then it was to go raise the series a to try and convince investors that this is a worthwhile problem And we pitched that vision of hey our next product want to put out there is our checking account And that was the most requested feature on behalf of our members at that time That takes a couple of years to build out and what was the revenue like pre a or I guess like going into the a Pre a was actually pretty tough because we had a lot of product market fit requiring a lot of you have the signals But not necessarily the tipping I guess the tipping was still proving itself out as a way to like actually Drive more revenue than than the losses that we were generating it on these advances and through That series a process. We're still losing like 20 cents for every dollar We were giving out so the model not been proven other that we knew people wanted free money Which was a pretty easy thing to convince people of the series a was Damn, you're impossible that they're trying to convince Venture capitalists who have never paid an over Jeff V in their life that this is a worthwhile problem to go after When there are no other like really successful Digital banking apps at the time we got laughed out of the room a hundred times It took like a hundred and twenty meetings for us to finally get one investor that mostly like the team I'm thinking really love the idea that much and after that investment was when we figured out the The loss rate we got it down to 2% all of a sudden the company is profitable We're profitable in 2018 and 2019 Raised money to billion-dollar evaluation a couple years later about a year later. Sorry What was the thing that these guys didn't understand when I like would they just look at the deck? I'm just thinking about it like if I saw the deck when I was just trying to quit do quick math Am I saying okay cool the overdraft fee market is 30 billion and it takes a switch for them to make that market zero Like how are they processing the VCs of the world processing this I think their thought process was How are you gonna make money off the customer ultimately these are younger consumers or this customers are not making much money Like what's the longer-term lifetime value potential here? VCs are also very for better was very herd mentality. There wasn't a lot of precedent for putting a lot of money behind Digital banking apps and so we were like one of the first also being a LA based company Wasn't helpful at the time LA's have much more of a and that's kind of right before fintech was hot Yeah, it was fintech got hot like 20 to 18 19 hot hot. Yeah, that's right So you were like early even like 20 at 20 19 20. That's right. We were early. Yeah, you were super early No one loved no one loved fintech yet. Exactly wasn't a buzzword yet. That's right. Oh, that's interesting. Okay, and so Who invested what was the thing? What was the thing that like what did people see at the end of the day? I think what ultimately happened was it was it was a team-based bet, right? The guy was still mostly in looking at the the opportunity But he liked the the founding team behind the story We'd all had some kind of successful Exit before we had good traction and we had advocacy from an early seed investor Who was like look I'm confident that these guys are going to turn this loss rate around It's just think of their loss rate as Cack right like even if you think about their you know the fact they already have a $5 cat to acquire a user Just think of this loss rate is something that is to get someone in the door You're ultimately going to get this person a checking account and other financial products in the future So don't look at it that way and that finally got this one guy to see the light wrote us a 10 million dollar check and That was enough to give us a significant amount of runway to really prove it out Yeah, and what valuation do you guys do that? They that was like around 40. Okay at the time So relatively healthy valuation. Yeah with somewhat unproven Profitability metrics and from your perspective was at that point was just a scale engineering Pretty much scale engineering and yeah, just just more R&D investments into yeah building out the underwriting part of the business So we could profitably issue all these cash advances to the member base And so what was the first offering that you launched with a suit? So you closed around you build out the new offerings What was the first one that would get people to like what was the stickiest one? I guess you probably tested a bunch of things well We only had one thing right so actually the first launch of the app was you download Dave You connect your bank account and we offered two services one was financial insights to tell you about all your upcoming bills So that's like the Netflix water and power bill predictor Type scenario and then we have the no-interest cash revans up to 75 bucks. That was the the early launch and The series a it just helped put more gasoline on an already great user acquisition funnel So we took that business that same thing didn't really launch anything else additional beyond that got to Over a million users and we raised money at a billion dollar valuation about a year and a half later So it was a good time to raise was it scary Were you like shit and bricks half the time because it's like you're on the edge to some extent like during the A round You're getting a hundred nos. That's daunting enough. Yeah, some people could say that's the game Which okay cool the kind of is but what is going through your head at that point? Are you thinking I fuck this up? No one gets it or do you see it? And so you're just like I just need to find a believer The thing about VC it's tough, but you just need to get one guy Yeah, right you don't need you don't need 20 guys and once you have that one getting your join Yeah, it's so important getting a high quality lead our series a investor ended up just taking the whole round He's like I don't even need other investors like I see it now so he ended up owning a north of 20% of the company at that time and Yeah, fortunately, we didn't really need other investors at that point And then our series B was also just one investor that believe that Dave was a unicorn company and one check same same kind of thing Wow, did Mark ever double down mark put more money in in a subsequent round sure And one and one more round and was your goal always to go public was that always clear or was that not like they'd become more clear Look the best companies in the world Generally end up going public and they have fast growth and they want to maintain their independent status Most companies end up being public and so did I think we'd get there that fast me in 2017 to we went public Jan 6 2022 that was a pretty fast turnaround for for going public most companies take 7 to 10 years But there was a window to raise a lot of capital at a good valuation And we took the opportunity early even though it may you know ultimately have been too early You know the thing that strikes me as so interesting about your journey is just how unique it is that you were in a position to have overdraft fees as a young adult coming out of college and then in a position later on in life to actually do something about it Yeah, I don't know that there's a big overlap between people who have overdraft fees and in the ability to do something about it And so when I hear about like the hundred investors saying no because they don't understand the problem and All these other hurdles that you had to face. I mean you you testified in front of Congress about this, right? Yeah, and I was reading that report and just thinking How many of them truly understand the problem they might from talking to constituents in Congress Yeah, and and is this on a societal level something that that we should put more energy towards in terms of like Taking care of those who are most financially vulnerable because when I see your story and I think of How it could have gone if you were in a different financial situation Where your overdraft fees were literally digging you into a hole that you could never financially recover from and then what are we preventing? that person from becoming later on in life and so with the lack of overdraft fees that Dave offers that Customer who could prevent that could eventually like you know go on to start his own company or her own company and you know Just start. Exactly. I just gave you a commercial. Exactly. Yeah Cue the tears. You did. No, I think it's Look our our vision of the company is to create financial opportunity for anyone and our mission is to build products on level of financial playing field because People are not getting access to the same opportunities and that would that was me Wealthy people financial people are not paying over Jeff ease But if you are doesn't mean you're any you know less of a person just means you're just in a different position You need a different product and that was ultimately why we ended up building Dave What was the transition like from going a CEO pre-public to now what you have to deal with today in a post-public scenario? Yeah, like I think the big difference is you're talking a lot more investors. That's that's for sure You know before you're managing a couple investors obviously when you go fundraising to try and raise venture capital You're meeting with a lot of people at once, but being a public company. It's every quarter You're not meeting with a dozen or so shareholders You're going to several conferences to go meet people and continue to tell the story because now you're managing 10,000 shareholders not just a small handful You're also managing employees who are constantly looking at the stock price Yeah, and that is a very massive distraction as far as day-to-day Workload, I think being a public company has been helpful to like drive a lot of rigor on getting the quarter closed Having a really good planning session We have we use okay ours at the at the business which is very helpful to get the whole team together quarterly Make sure we're hitting our numbers planning, and I think that's really Matured the the whole company in a way that's made us better off than being a private company. So you like it Yeah, I like it. I think The finance team and the legal team it's different for them because like they've had to pick up a lot more work To maintain a public company status versus being private For me like my day-to-day job like running the business is not Change materially and hasn't necessarily gotten harder other than just the managing the communication piece And when it comes to new products you guys are working on now, right? So now you got to you got to get growth somewhere. Yeah, and so how do you guys think about that? What initiatives what things are you pouring money into? Yeah, so we we're still investing in the in the core offering Right now they have the checking account for how many users you guys have now 8 million customers So it's a big base. Yeah, we launched Dave checking our Dave banking at the end of 2021 And then last year so that was that kind of a beta we rolled that out So people could opt into that product as an upgraded feature That went well. So last year we gave Dave bank accounts to all of our members So now every customer gets a Dave debit card and that's a huge area of our growth is We are now a Checking account that comes with best in class what we call extra cash, which is our overdraft product We can access up to five hundred dollars now In between paychecks to advance whenever you need it and now people can use us to pay rent gas groceries Short-term expenses you can you can cover a lot with five hundred dollars And that is a huge leg up over banks that still 34 bucks to overdraft as little as five or ten dollars in your account Dave you can count on this money Whenever you need it and that's a huge leg up for our members Over the course of this time has the have the banks evolved in any way or are the overdraft fees still the 35 bucks Or like has anything changed in that world, you know before this call I was just going through everyone's overdraft policy just to double check I mean chase the same thing 34 bucks like they'll give you until the end of the day to Accounts that you hold them to the other one that you hold them And they go out there and they advertise this to consumers like oh, you know We have this new friendly overdraft service, but if you're someone that overdrafts you don't have the money by the end of the day It's not about even the next business day people on on average for Dave They're using our version of overdraft extra cash on average like 11 days before they get paid next So they are way far out before their next paycheck hits So paying us back the next day that's not a reasonable way to say You know we are getting rid of overdraft fees. It's still 34 bucks They'll still charge you up to three per day still 100 bucks Bank of america's made some moves to go down to 10 dollars overdraft, but per instance, right? So they'll still hit you with you know two or more per day on the next day, and then it's 10. Yeah interesting exactly And when it comes to what's working now in terms of growing from like eight to 10 Let's say is it I know you guys doing commercials now. Yep Probably radio, but what's the thing that you guys are doing that or at least the thing that you're seeing a lot of conversion from or What's what's the most effect social media are you guys on tiktok? What's the thing that's working? We're everywhere. Yeah, we're everywhere. I mean we're did a lot of channel expansion over the last few years So we're tiktok or instagram or snap or tv or radio Any partnerships I could see like maybe a cool partnership with snap. I don't know I'm just thinking like in terms of demo who plays better instagram instagram doesn't feel it feels a little older Maybe tiktok. Maybe snap. I don't know You know our age range is pretty wide. So I'd say the most popular demographic or age demographic is around 22 to 24 but 80 percent within the range of 18 to 34 We'll say and so they're somewhere online. They're somewhere on youtube or who are instagram snap one of these channels there They are And where are they usually in terms of like in in the country generally falling like city populists So they're they're the big cities. We have some level of small concentration in southern markets where Banks have a lot of overdraft fees more so than most and Credit scores generally tend to be lower in some of these areas and people that have lower credit scores Love our our cash advance because there's no credit check. We don't use credit scores at all It's all based on transaction data when you think about the future of banking And so when you first started the company these companies have huge overhead a lot a lot of locations I probably have Eight or nine bank accounts, but I never go to the bank. I don't need to go to the bank ever Unless you're signing a significant waiver and everything's just phone call based And so when you think about forget Dave for a second and you think about like 2030 2050 What does banking look like in that world like what is chase doing? Who's definitely going to be around? What is Dave doing? How do you view that? I think we'll all be using technology to greatly reduce our cost structure Still, you know, I think for that for Dave we're already very lean, but how can we use technology to scale to 10 times the amount of people that we're servicing and do so with You know very few additional employees and that's going to come with developments in AI That are going to be used to have amazing customer support Have amazing, you know teller personalized experiences Great underwriting experiences without really the need to interact with Humans and the more you can do that that just leads to a much better experience that leads to lower fees for people Because it's cost structure that That creates high prices and you guys are dabbling in the AI piece now We do it now. So our customer support about half our responses are from AI At this point. So that's brought our cost down Tremendously and then we have AI looking and doing all of our underwriting at the company So when you get when you apply for the cash advance with Dave It's all goes through a underwriting model that's powered by AI And we've been able to scale up our our limits from 75 to 500 Just based on that based on that and we've seen default rates go Down as a result of of the AI as well. So larger amounts Lower default rates even with all this interest rate situation going on and inflation You're seeing a lot of consumer lenders seeing Default rates creep up and Dave we just reported last month and we've had record low defaults How has the interest rate affected the business in any way these like high interest rates? well The positive benefit to the interest rate is that We have a lot of deposits at the bank at our partner bank and we have a rev share on on on the float So we actually generate a decent amount of money now from just float deposit interest but It's been so negative on everything else around the business just because like this big macro Theme that we've been sucked into You know We've been sucked into this consumer lender debate like our consumer lender is going to have interest rates creep up significantly I don't view us to be really like a consumer lender today in most respects because We get people on average a couple hundred bucks is our average advance size The payback dates are very quick. It's all AI based We're not giving out some like massive line of credit or Taking huge credit exposure. We do like a billion dollars a quarter of cash advance And we do that with a hundred million dollar facility from from victory park It's a tiny little facility just shows how limited exposure we have with what's going on but Given the uncertainty in the market and how risk-off investors are we just get thrown into this bucket of You know you're unprofitable right now You have consumer credit risk. You were a SPAC Like let's just sort of see how things shake out before we actually Start putting any real investment dollars back to work and something like does that get to you at all? Personally, or do you just are you just pretty good at blocking it out? I'm a pretty persevering guy. I mean, yeah, it's frustrating. We were for we were a five billion dollar company in march So 12 months ago. Yeah, we're five billion dollars today. We're like 70 million million. Yeah, we're down 98 8% and the company is time to buy they say Yeah, I mean the company is significantly better off than it was when we actually went public So that's very frustrating business is better team is better Financials are better loss rates are better yet you've lost like 98 percent of your value How does that even make sense other than the people who were investing supporting those valuations? Are just sitting on the sidelines until they know what's going to go on with potential recession Our interest rate is going to keep going up The cost of capital is harder to access Well and speaking of uncertainty in the market We're not too far removed from the silicon valley bank collapse and I know from my understanding that it was They didn't meet the regulations in the dot act where they had to I think it was banks under 250 billion in assets, right? As a digital bank, are you subject to the same Standards that that other banks that have like physical locations and all that have to undergo So, you know, it's important. No, we're not a bank So we actually have all our deposits stored with a partner bank called Evolve bank and trust which is based in Tennessee in Memphis And they are a fdic regulated bank And so they have to adhere to all the regulations and deal with all the regulators And take on that work for us and that's a big part of how we're able to scale up So significantly without having a huge overhead is we don't have to deal with all that They take that on for a percentage of our our overall revenue and that's a great trait because it's a lot to take on and We just don't need that headache of being a bank in today's environment Was that always a term the neobank? Was that always a term or did that turn like a peer at some point of your journey? It's how we sort of describe ourselves. We can't call ourselves a bank because we're you know technically we're not And so the best way to describe us is either as you know a banking app or a neobank or you know digital first Just can't say we're a bank So we have to figure out some alternative term and that tends to be the way That we would describe ourselves as like a you know a non-bank Banking institution. Sure. Will you ever do loans like sizable loans or anything like that? Because given if you if you have the underwriting, right? It seems like you could do any instrument That's right. Look, we're looking at every avenue of banking It's an exciting place for us to expand into is is deeper and consumer credit We've issued 70 million cash advances now And that all is all of those are underwritten by transaction data between six and 12 months of someone's account So you can only imagine how many billions of transactions we've been able to Use to underwrite that so yeah, that's a big thesis of ours Is like we can use all this data to offer Something like a credit card installment loan and do so at a significant Discount to what banks are charging for that. Actually credit card late fees are even worse than over Jeff. That's right. Yeah It's like 30 billion 40 billion dollars of of credit card late fees. I think overall interest and and fees on credit cards for The lower income population in this country. It's like 120 billion dollars a year. Yeah, it's a bunch larger It's significant So that's an area where that's definitely not going away. It's not going away. No and same thing It's it's very identical to the problem. We solved an over Jeff where something like a credit card has High cost structure banks are giving away all kinds of these rewards and they're advertising heavily on tv and There's so many competitive products out there that are Crowd in the market But the big thing that still remains for people is how do you get more access to people? They're getting rejected for these good cards because there's so many predatory Credit products that are out there for people that are getting rejected from these things, you know, 36% epr late fees It's it's crazy. Yeah, everyone's getting one of those in their mail right now. Yeah. All right. What can you tell us? What's on the horizon? What's the sneak peek into the future? sneak peek so we actually We haven't talked a lot publicly about a new product we launched a few months ago called surveys so back in 2018 we launched a small feature called side hustle and similar to that that you were talking about earlier like how can we empower like the future entrepreneurs that that we're helping We launched something called side hustle which connects people to gig economy jobs So I'll help you get a job at uber or lift instacart Door dash and we send hundreds of thousands of job leads a month Through this platform to help people get work and people have made millions of dollars off of Off of this do you vet them based on their their credit history or anything like that like or their no It's just like hey here in this location based in this location. Here's like 20 things you could go do to Make an extra 20 30 40 bucks a day And get yourself ahead The number one job we would send people to is At home take home surveys So people want to like be on their computer or on their phone and make some money So we launched dave surveys A few months ago and you can take brand surveys in the app About major brands or companies whatever and earn anywhere between 25 cents and five or ten bucks a survey And we're about to eclipse like a million dollars earned From people just on our own app and the beauty of that is that all the money that you earn on the surveys Goes on to your on to your dave debit card. So it's another reason like to engage and activate the feedback right away Yeah, there's an ecosystem there. Exactly because these survey companies in general They suck like you have to Go to these third party websites sign up. They pay you off an amazon gift card You got to wait for those in the mail. This is actual like money you can earn. So that's been pretty cool And we're also exploring adding like high interest savings to the product to to help people Earn more interest nothing nothing crazy there, but that's been something we're we're interested in better than like 0.25% or something Yeah, yeah, it's shocking. But again, what the big banks are paying is nothing compared to What's the point you look at somebody that's in a financially better position They're in treasuries or in money markets. They're earning for Four and a quarter the average person is not getting out of major bank. They're actually paying the bank all these fees Yeah, it's a negative interest. Well, listen tell everyone where they can sign up for dave. Yeah dave.com dave.com Go to dave in the app store. But yeah dave.com is the easiest way to Grab info about us and try the service out. Thanks Jason. Yeah, I appreciate your time. 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