Steve Streit, Green Dot’s CEO, has been quite reticent about his company’s mobile-first bank account, GoBank.
That didn’t change with last night’s first quarter earning call. Streit spoke optimistically of the product, but offered few specifics. The product is not a significant “revenue contributor” to Green Dot as a whole, Streit said, but its underlying platform is proving useful in other areas of Green Dot’s business. He had this to say about the product’s metrics:
Online and app store enrollments are continuing to grow and the customer behavior trend in terms of recurring deposits, direct deposit enrollments and other metrics are materially better than our average prepaid card customer metrics.
When asked if GoBank was meeting the company’s expectations, Streit replied that the company had no expectations about the product, or rather, none that he would share:
So the good news is we don’t have expectations so they are easy to meet on GoBank in the sense that it’s a new product that internally we have goals for our product team, but nothing that we’ve ever announced in public for that exact reason. So the answer is it’s growing. We are up to actually a good number of accounts. If this were a standalone community bank, [it] would be a massive product, but Green Dot is such a large company relative to the accounts we acquire that it isn’t material to Green Dot. So it’s doing great. We like the enrollment patterns. We like how people are enrolling [at] app stores and online. The usage on it is terrific, meaning that the deposit rates, the direct deposit enrollments, the redeposit, which would be the equivalent of a prepaid card of let’s call it first-time deposit or additional retention deposits, are good. The fees people are paying us are (inaudible) we have modeled.
Streit also said he was happy with the way GoBank was going and was proud of the product and its tech stack.He cited the Simple acquisition by BBVA as a sign that Green Dot made the right decision to own its own bank, rather than build on another bank’s platform.
He concluded by saying the company has plans for GoBank. The account has so far seen few changes in functionality since its official launch last summer.
We hope to do quite a lot with GoBank and hope to be able to execute our plans that we have internally for it.
Green Dot reported a quarterly profit of $15.3 million, down from $15.6 million a year ago. Revenue on the quarter was approximately $160 million.