There isn’t any more personal than our personal health and our personal finances. I’ve spent the majority of my career helping people with both, making hard conversations more approachable and taking the stigma out of asking for help.
It’s through this process that I discovered my passion for helping others by building a relationship based on trust and support.
I’ve learned that strong relationships take time to build, and that’s true whether it’s a relationship with a new friend, your own physical health, or with your finances.
I based my first company on helping people leverage their deep motivation to achieve a result, like becoming a better ballroom dancer or looking better on the beach.
I found that both physical and financial health share the same principles that create self- improvement. People seeking to improve their financial health have to start small to be successful over the long term. Implementing small changes yields results that serve as motivation for more and bigger changes, and that’s exactly the behavioral change that Mimble leverages.
At Mimble, we leverage a new model to empower people to take small, important actions by giving them rewards. Most people don’t have great financial education, so we’re trying to build and strengthen a direct correlation between interaction with money and learning what it means to use it.
In our app, you can set savings goals and track your progress, and you can even tie those savings goals to brand-specific gift cards that offer monetary rewards for the purchase. The more you save towards the purchase, the bigger your reward. You can even send a gift card to a friend to use and pay at the register.
In short, we built a gift card wallet and marketplace that serves as the foundation to reward people for saving.
Setting savings goals is extremely important, so when a consumer has successfully saved up for a shopping spree, we can leverage that consumer behavior in a platform providing immediate rewards.
While we started out as a consumer-facing stand-alone savings app to help people save rewards for gift cards, we’re now taking the technology and enabling Mimble to work with any bank’s mobile app. It’s a powerful rewards engine platform, and that’s what we’ve focused on with the banks.
Community banks often have original relationships with consumers, and while customers do trust them, we’re shifting the consumer’s view of banking as something more. We’re fostering a view of the bank that is warm, organic, and a reveals an ongoing relationship with their customers.
Our technology gives the bank the ability to partner with their commercial customers, giving the banks distribution in exchange for a merchant-funded reward. This creates a win-win as the business gets to reach new customers and the bank can provide a free reward to its customers.
When we learned about the FIS Fintech Accelerator, we pitched Mimble as bank-facing, and have immensely enjoyed the opportunity to work with FIS and live in Little Rock. This program has been extremely collaborative and has given us the opportunity to interact with over 60 banks. Being around so many other entrepreneurs who are in the same boat with you is inspiring, and it’s been great fun despite the stress of building an early-stage company.
Our technology is still being converted, but keep an eye out for the ability to send and receive gifts from your mobile bank app starting early in 2020.