Challenge: Making payments but not getting ahead

40% of Americans have less than $300 in savings and the lack of financial literacy has cost over $415B in 2020 alone. At the same time, 54% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck and 77% of households carry debt. These facts mean that paying off debt is extremely difficult, if not nearly impossible, for many people.

Qoins also wanted to help Christian's and Nate's communities gain financial literacy — communities that are LatinX or Black and are underserved or unserved entirely. They wanted to help folks struggling with debt build healthy habits surrounding personal finances in order to become debt free.

Solution: Automated savings to swipe away at debt

Qoins knew that having a debit card at the top of users’ wallets would help people tackle their debt even faster with every swipe. That’s why Qoins partnered with Bond to create the Qoins Card paired with a dedicated bank account. Qoins customers can both pay down debt directly and build savings for larger monthly payments.

Results: Multiple options for paying down debt

Before Bond, users needed to link their debt account platforms to make one extra payment each month. Now, customers can not only pay down their debt with each purchase using their debit card, they can also save money on top of the pre-arranged payments they’ve automated with Qoins.

By using Bond’s APIs to create sub-accounts, Qoins customers can additionally save for multiple goals at the same time via these routes:

• Roundups: Most of the time, purchases don’t land perfectly on the dollar. Customers can choose to add those extra cents into their savings accounts.
• Weekly deposits: Users can set up a comfortable amount and send it directly into their savings account each week, on a day of their choice.
• Payroll deductions: Customers can pre-set amounts that will directly deposit into their account from their paychecks.
• Smart Saving: Qoins has a proprietary algorithm that is similar to round ups, but based on aggressiveness level customers are comfortable with putting aside and saving — much like a 401k.

Today and beyond with Bond

Trusting a recommendation from their bank, Qoins partnered with Bond to launch their card faster. Bond’s platform also minimizes the engineering effort and compliance overhead to get cards in hands.

But there’s quite a bit behind a launch. “If we’re going to be our own program manager, we would have to add compliance, risk, audit, ACH, card production, marketing, card provider — we’d have to do it all on our own and it would have been a real headache,” noted Christian. “Through a streamlined and thoughtful process working with the experts at Bond, they made it not only easy to build with their APIs, but enabled us to understand industry best practices, our responsibilities, and how we can truly leverage Bond as our program manager.”

Together, Qoins and Bond are impacting lives — a few coins at a time.