News and Announcements
Why is Moroku buying a bank?
- Published November 30, 2020 12:00AM UTC
- Publisher Wholesale Investor
- Categories Company Updates
Colin Weir, CEO & Founder at Moroku:
Three years ago I met a group of Entrepreneurs and lawyers in San Francisco and Los Angeles. Money Service Businesses were getting abandoned by banks across the country, placing their businesses and customers in peril.
With Moroku’s digital bank capabilities, a group of ready customers, investors and some very smart regulation tech lawyers we launched www.fintechbank.co, a bank for money service businesses (MSB), as a Moroku JV, with a vision of banking the bottom 80% of the country who were being left behind.
After 3 years of trotting up and down to Washington in application of a banking charter, COVID hit and the opportunity got more real as the government needed to get money to the underserved. With investor impatience we identified a bank that we could buy, pivot to our MSB bank idea and achieved tacit regulatory support to do so.
Last month Fintech Bank signed a term sheet to acquire the bank to complete before the year end and locked in a very experienced US Bank CEO and Navy Commander as the new entity’s CEO.
Moroku then signed a term sheet with Fintech Bank to provide $US2M to the bank to help fund the acquisition with platform and services for the pivot to be provided by Moroku. We put the money in, we get revenue back and keep the equity. It’s good.
Since then a major payments provider has backed Moroku up to also fund the deal with that round gaining momentum fast.
Of the $AU5M Moroku is raising now, $2.85 will go into funding the bank acquisition in the US, with the remainder being used as working capital for the other projects we shall discuss further this week.
Your investment gets you a decent stake in a profitable US bank, pivoting to serve the bottom 80% of the country in addition to the rest of the Moroku story.
Keep those questions and offer letters rolling. There is much good work to do.
About Moroku
Moroku’s vision is of a world where everyone is being great with their money. To do that, financial services needs to be fun and social. When service is this way, people pay attention, get curious, overcome challenges, grow skills, and go on a journey of mastery.
Characterised by games and social, customer engagement, of all ages and backgrounds, is being redefined. Customers want to have fun, take on challenges, be recognised and share. Moroku’s platform and processes create engaging financial services experiences for banks and wealth providers that empower customers and help them compete. It does this with its proprietary GameSystem methodology that maps the customer journey towards mastery and an innovative, cloud based, application engagement platform that drives the user experience, getting users to pay attention, build financial muscle and act.
The company makes money by integrating its cloud platform into the digital fabric of financial service providers’ technology and charging for that on a monthly user subscription basis. Go to market is a blend of direct and indirect with a growing number of large fintech’s embedding Moroku into their solutions for scale.