Stash Lands Big Series D Round To Launch Mobile Banking This Year

February 16, 2024         By: Steven Anderson

Get busy growing, or get busy dying. That’s one of the greatest takeaways from “The Shawshank Redemption”, and for Stash, it’s taking the former half seriously. It’s recently raised a hefty slug of cash from a Series D funding round that’s going to give it the necessarily liquidity to plunge into mobile banking sometime in 2018.

The Series D—featuring several existing investors like Goodwater Capital and Breyer Capital as well as its leader, Union Square Ventures—pulled in a whopping $37.5 million in aid of that goal. With a current user base of 1.7 million clients and five million subscribers—and around 40,000 new clients joining every week—Stash certainly makes a case for itself as a potential banking offering.

Better yet, Stash even has a clear market profile that a lot of banks may not be actively pursuing. Most of Stash’s users don’t make $50,000 per year, which is a target that’s less than attractive to current banks. Since Stash users can start building a portfolio with as little as $5, it’s a good way to get into the fray from a mobile app.

As for the banking, that part is being held a bit close to the vest right now, but word from the company’s co-founder and CEO Brandon Krieg notes that “…the parts of banking that are really important to us…” will be in play. It seems to be mostly informational, with Krieg pointing to ways to “…help our customers understand their money; understand how they’re spending and saving…” as some of these”parts.”

While there’s definitely room in the market for mobile banking alternatives that provide services for the unbanked or the otherwise underbanked, it’s not immediately clear that Stash will provide these services. Checks for bill paying, or just online bill paying, would be a fine start; it’s clear Stash has wealth management taken care of thanks to its original stock in trade, so more of those “grunt work” services of banks would likely be useful here.

Still, every new start is a start, and hopefully Stash can get brick-and-mortar banks refocused on the general community that may not have the dollars it would like, but that still need the services.