GRAND: Bringing Mobile Payments Principles Together With Frugality

If it always seems like, like the old song said, there’s just too much month at the end of the money, you’re hardly alone. In fact, saving for retirement—or for anything else, for that matter—is a challenge on par with the worst. However, there’s a new tool out there that can help, and the folks behind the GRAND mobile and online platform recently tipped us off about it.

The GRAND platform, found both on a standard website and on an app in the Apple App Store, offers a novel thought: what if every dollar you saved was the equivalent of a raffle prize ticket? There’s a new weekly winner of the grand prize, and “thousands” of smaller cash prizes are also on hand as well.

GRAND connects to every bank in the United States, reports note, and users can establish a pre-set amount to save weekly, or run that function manually. The savings are stored in an FDIC-insured account for added security, and accounts earn one percent. That may not sound like much, but it’s actually substantially more than the typical savings account offers. GRAND is free for the first month, but for every month thereafter, users are charged $2 a month to make those new savings pushes.

Matt Cohen, GRAND founder and CEO, noted “…I was always shocked by the fact that Americans spend over $70 billion on lottery tickets every year, yet have virtually nothing in their savings accounts. I felt there was an opportunity to help people start to save, so we created a nationwide ‘can’t lose lottery’ that combines the intelligence and sophistication of the best personal finance products, with the fun of having a chance to win life changing amounts of money.”

It’s likely that the company is counting on getting a lot of users in place. Given how much they’re planning to give away—there’s a $25,000 grand prize for the launch date alone—they’re going to need plenty of $2 users a month in on the action. Still, if they can pull in enough users to make a steady income stream, they should be able to come out ahead.

The proposition may be a bit shaky, but with the right numbers, it might just work out in the end.