A former Googler just launched www.nickel.co, which is an app for kids to manage their allowance. Their backing bank is Sutton Bank. My guess is one of the pa

A former Googler just launched www.nickel.co, which is an app for kids to manage their allowance. Their backing bank is Sutton Bank. My guess is one of the partners that they were referring to is CorePro (http://corepro.io/ http://corepro.io/) which was spun out of SmartyPig (https://www.smartypig.com/ https://www.smartypig.com/). Their backing bank was Lincoln Savings Bank. One of the consumers of CorePro was Qapital (qapital.com). It seemed like recently, they switched models from Lincoln Savings Bank's individual account to Wells Fargo's custodial account. In any case, if you're doing anything in consumer FinTech, the technology/product is the easy part. Banking partnership, customer acquisition, and unit economics is the hard part. Focus on solving the hard part first before building the technology. Edit: One thing that they could have done for an MVP is a bring-your-own-bank-account model. 1) Parents would open a bank account for their kids (or the kid may already have their own bank account) 2) Integrate with Plaid Connect to get ACH info. 3) Use Dwolla ACH API (free) to transfer funds between parent's bank account to kid's bank account. (The downside of this is that this is a 2 legged ACH transfer which may take up to a week -- but for this use case, it shouldn't be a problem.) This will get them the same value proposition that they would have had with bank integration. Once they prove out the demand, they can then optimize: 1) [Reduce ACH lag] Use an actual ACH processor that will handle the transfer between accounts. The downside is that this is expensive. 2) [Reduce ACH cost) Use a real bank (Wells Fargo, Chase, Citi) as an ACH processor -- this cuts out the lag in transfers. The catch to this is that to work with these banks, they want to see sufficient activity 3) [Eliminate need to bring your own bank] Partner with existing bank to provide account opening service. If you can prove sufficient activity and traction, many regional banks are interested in a lower cost customer acquisition channel and innovative products. Alternatively, use custodial accounts and they can earn float on the deposits. What they were trying to do is jump to #3 before proving out the demand. Secondly, banks are approached all the time by startups to do these types of "partnerships". To banks, unless you can show traction or sufficient volume, it's not worth their time to work with you. The large banks (WF, Chase, etc) don't see much business from this area. The small banks don't have the resources or risk tolerance to do this. So you need to find the sweet spot of banks to establish these relationships. There are a number of regional banks that are willing to work with startups (tip: scout the ToS of these fintech startups to see who they have partnership with) I'm not sure what their monetization strategy was going to be, but the unit economics here don't really work out for low deposit amounts. (I've spent a lot of time research this area in FinTech)