Green Dot may become one of the nation’s largest banks, CEO Steve Streit said in the prepaid card company’s 3Q earnings call yesterday.
Green Dot’s banking ambitions extend far beyond its GoBank mobile banking product, which now sits beside Bluebird and other prepaid cards and alternative checking account offerings on the shelf at Walmart.
During yesterday’s call, in answer to a multi-part question, Streit described GoBank’s evolution from a flashy mobile product targeting millennials to a no-frills checking account for the Walmart demographic:
Does GoBank attract a different demographic in Walmart than it did when it was online? And the answer is, likely so. We expect to attract a lot more customers than we did online. At the same time, it could be that those customers are not quite as affluent as what we were attracting with the online-only version. But that’s perfectly acceptable. We want GoBank to be America’s favorite checking account. And to do that, you need to be in America’s largest retailer.
Streit also described how Green Dot can occupy a larger place in Americans’ financial lives by launching new products:
I also want to point out that while GoBank is our brand name for the checking account products sold at Walmart, we intend to use our underlying checking account platform to create other checking account offerings that we plan to sell through our other retail distribution partners and perhaps also through large scale white-label partnerships. As a result, we believe that over time, our GoBank brand and other brands of Green Dot Bank checking account products collectively have their very real opportunity to become among the most widely held checking accounts in all of America, which is a very exciting opportunity, for sure.
Green Dot’s banking charter was acquired in 2011, and is used to manage its suite of prepaid products, its GoBank accounts, and its most profitable business, holding funds for the Walmart Money Card. (The company is notoriously shy about reporting how the numbers break down between those products.) Green Dot’s deepening relationship with Walmart has led it to be dubbed by some pundits as “Walmart’s bank.”
Streit also disclosed the bank is not actively looking into offering credit products at this time, and is looking to take processing in-house but will continue its 15-year relationship with TSYS “for the next months” going forward.