How Adam Hadi and Current take the underbanked to the bank.

Zach Johnson

Dylan Carpenter

Adam Hadi

Episode
10
|
Season 1

Adam Hadi

,

VP of Marketing, Current

Apple PodcastsGoogle PodcastsLive on SpotifyLive on Youtube

The VP of Marketing at Current, a leading U.S. challenger neobank built to meet the needs of people who have been overlooked by the traditional banking industry, Adam Hadi specializes in user acquisition and influencer marketing. Previously, he was the Head of Marketing at Draft (PlayDraft.com) and led User Acquisition at Topps Digital after spending several years as an Economist for the Bureau of Labor Statistics. He earned an M.A. in Applied Economics from Johns Hopkins University and a B.A. in Economics from Binghamton University.

Key Takeaways

  • How to make money by stealing customers that your competitors don’t want.
  • What you can do to minimize the upfront financial hit when hiring influencers.
  • How to turn what prospects hate about your competitors into something they’ll love about you.
  • The amazing advertising power of emojis.
  • How to win a guerilla war against industry goliaths.

The Transcript

Season 1
,
Episode
10
Transcript

Zach Johnson:

All right. All right. All right. Welcome to another episode of the Rich Ad Poor Ad podcast. This is your host Zach Johnson, founder and CEO of FunnelDash. We got Mr. Dylan Carpenter. How are you doing, Dylan?

Dylan Carpenter:

I'm doing pretty good on this fine Thursday afternoon. I'm pumped for this one. This is going to be a juicy one.

Zach Johnson:

Yes, it is. Yes, it is. This is an exciting one, right. This is actually the first fintech that we've actually had on the show. They've got some impressive numbers that they posted up and published in the last month on CNBC. I'm looking at their stats right now. They just rolled out a hit over a million users. I don't think we've had anybody on the show that has over a million users, so that's epic. Tracking it, 100,000 users just in I think it was like April and May alone. So, some insane ludicrous levels of growth. They're essentially a challenger neobank for young hipsters and millennials and what's called the under-banked. I think they're about to pass over 1.2 million users. They should be passing a billion dollars in deposits here very shortly. They've done it all through advertising and influencer marketing. I'm so excited to have on today the VP of marketing at Current. Adam, welcome to the show.

Adam:

Hey, thank you so much guys. I appreciate all the kind words. I'd love to say we did it all through advertising, but then the rest of the team here would kill me. We've done it through both advertising and well really great product and product market fit.

Zach Johnson:

That's awesome. Yeah. I mean, the numbers speak for themselves in terms of the growth that you guys have had. For some people in the same space as maybe Chime would be the closest competitor maybe for a slightly different market. Some people might be familiar with a SoFi bank, but you guys are definitely in that neo challenger bank space and really just came out of nowhere in the last 12 months. I mean, you've seen impressive growth. So, I would love to hear more about your background, Adam. It seems like you've got quite a bit of experience in the influencer marketing area.

Adam:

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Certainly. I wouldn't say we exactly came out of nowhere because we've been working on this for a while, but it's really we kind of set the foundation, which I guess allowed that to happen. I joined Current about 18 months ago and we really have seen explosive growth. But once again, as much as I'd love to credit our incredible marketing team, it's really because of the foundation that was set in place. What kind of sets us apart from a lot of those other fintechs you've mentioned is we've built our own banking infrastructure. I could go into the details on that kind of, but honestly I'm not the best person. But what that means is that we have way more control and way higher margins on our banking product than your typical other fintech would who mostly uses a lot of third parties to execute on like a debit card strategy.

Why that actually matters is that allows us to bank people that those other fintechs and particularly big banks just can't bank profitably. So, if you're talking about somebody who is paycheck to paycheck, an hourly worker, a gig economy worker, maybe a creative who doesn't make a consistent paycheck. Those are all the type of customers that big banks run away from because there's no way they can make money on. Even a lot of these neo banks that kind of focus on different segments, you mentioned like the SoFis who target wealthy millennials or maybe like Robinhood who obviously target of people who have money to invest. We're going to after the other 50% of America. It's about 130 million people in this country who are paycheck to paycheck where traditional banks really are not solving their problems.

What all that comes down to is the underlying business model of traditional banks, which is that they make money by loaning out deposits, upselling you into a credit card or really upselling you into a mortgage. The truth is if you're a 25-year-old Best Buy worker, you're not going to be doing any of those things any time soon. So, you're a loss to those banks. So rather than do that, they'll make money on you by charging you overdraft fees, minimum balance fees, maintenance fees, et cetera to the tune hundreds of dollars a year. Now my guess is most of your listeners are not in this demographic and honestly neither am I. So, that's something that I think a lot of people don't really understand is that half this country is paying lots of money for just a basic personal checking account from a traditional bank.

Zach Johnson:

Totally.

Adam:

So, that's what we're here to solve.

Zach Johnson:

Yeah, no. I love it. In terms of running customer acquisition and growth and marketing for a bank, I mean it's such a fun and interesting conversation because it's not... Like the eCommerce advertiser, it's a relatively simple conversation. Like what's your CPA, what's your margins, and what's your average order value, and how much are you spending? With banks, I mean one, you're dealing with a lot of friction in general in terms of what it takes to actually get somebody to sign up for a banking product. With the KYB or the KYC rules in the space, there's a lot of fields to fill out there. So, you have some friction, but also I mean you're talking about you're entire revenue stream coming off of bank deposits and interchange on debit cards. You really have to know your LTV curve over time. So, talk to us about the journey of you starting out as Current and then really just getting clear on honing in on your top one to two KPIs for your advertising efforts.

Adam:

Yeah. Well, you really nailed it on the head there. If you would ask me maybe a few years ago like marketing for a bank, that sounds like so much fun, I'd probably laugh at you. But that's obviously changed in the recent years. It's such an interesting part of this. It's such an interesting space. A bit of a background on myself, I've worked for a number of different consumer tech companies in every space from like dating to eCommerce to lots of gaming, entertainment, et cetera, daily fantasy sports. That was a fun one, all these different spaces. Really I've never had to have the level of nuance and understanding of my customer than I do now because your bank, where you put your money and how you spend your money, that's so much more of a reflection of different parts of your life than anything else I've ever worked on.

Before I just needed to know okay, let's say in fantasy sports that you like football. Hey you like football, you're over 18 and you don't live in Utah. Great. That's about all I needed to know about you. In the case of, I'll use marketing at a company called Quidd. We sold digital collectibles and entertainment products. That was even easier. All I needed to know was you like Rick and Morty or you like Game of Thrones, and the rest that can kind of come in later, but I didn't need this true nuanced understanding of who you are.

In many ways, I was fortunate because I didn't have that nuanced understanding. I just didn't have access to the same level of detail that we have as a bank. We have a verified understanding of where our customers live, how old they are. You mentioned the KYC. That stands for know your customer. So, we have verified information on who they are. Obviously, we know where they work. We know where they spend their money. So, if I'm not doing a good, good job being relevant in my advertising, I really have nobody to blame. I have all the information I need there.

Zach Johnson:

Yeah. That's interest level targeting. Quidd is like, like you said, "Oh, you like Marvel. Great. Let me send you some Marvel gear." "You like Star Wars. Awesome. Game of Thrones, easy." Banking is also about behavior because it's not just your banking, I mean this is "for the podcast", on your LTV. You're banking on the behavior to really get an ROI on your marketing.

Adam:

Exactly. In fact, I mean really acquiring a customer it's obviously expensive in terms of marketing cost and MCAC and things like that, but it also costs us money. Every customer who signs up for Current, we're immediately at a loss. We ship you a card for free. We verify you who you are. These are all things that have cost associated with them, so it's very important that we're acquiring customers who are high intent and who are going to follow through and become customers of ours. For us, you mentioned the core KPIs earlier, our big one is direct depositors. That's what it really means to switch your bank is where does your direct deposit go because you could be signed up for a bunch of different financial institutions apps, et cetera, but no one really matter until they get your direct deposit. That's when I ask somebody, "Who's your bank," that's what it really means. That's our KPI. So, we're obviously trying to grow that and grow that efficiently.

Zach Johnson:

That's awesome. So, let's talk about some financial principles. Rich Ad Poor Ad podcast is all about helping advertisers learn the fundamentals and principles of managing cash flow and the finance aspect behind advertising. It's actually pretty fun because sometimes we get maybe ad agencies on the show or marketing folks that really don't know a ton about finance. But you're VP of marketing of a fintech, so you got to know something. You got to know something that other marketing folks don't know. Like you got-

Adam:

I will say I've won something because coming into this I didn't have any finance background. Even before getting into the world of user acquisition and mobile and everything like that, I actually worked as an economist at the Bureau of Labor Statistics for about five years. That's where I started my career.

Zach Johnson:

Riveting, absolutely riveting.

Adam:

So, my econ skills, those are fabulous. I'm very proud of those. My finance skills, pretty terrible up until about 18 months ago.

Zach Johnson:

That's awesome. Actually, before you give us some financial principles and tips here, walk everybody through how does Current acquire customers? I would briefly just mention ads and influencer marketing, but peel back that onion for us a little bit.

Adam:

Yeah. So, the influencer marketing is certainly a very important channel for us. I have gone back a number of companies now. I kind of got started in the world of influencer marketing about seven years ago or so at a time when it wasn't influencer marketing. It wasn't even called that. For me, I was actually working on a soccer app at the time and it was people uploading FIFA to YouTube. That's what it was about. I told people, I was like, "Okay, would you talk about your app top's kick?" So, that's really how I got into that space, but it's been an important channel at most of the companies I've worked for and certainly is the case here. I think being a financial institution, trust is really, really important, and this goes for all levels.

I mentioned we're working with a lot of folks who are paycheck to paycheck. I mean, if you are paycheck to paycheck and I'm telling you our core KPI is direct depositors, I'm asking you for your next paycheck. And that's literally all your money. It's incredibly a large ask for this company that maybe you've just seen on your phone. Maybe you've seen an ad somewhere else, but Wells Fargo is right around the corner. They may have been assholes for the last six years, but you know you can go there and yell at them. What happens if we don't show half your money, if our card doesn't work, something like that? It's an absolute disaster. So building up that trust with the customer is really, really important.

Influencers as a channel is very good for building trust because you have that inherent endorsement and that's nothing new. Using celebrities to endorse a product has been around as pretty as long as advertising and celebrities have been around, right.

Zach Johnson:

Yeah, but the way you've operationalized is what's really interesting and the level of scale. Using celebrities, it's been around but it's okay, yeah you got lucky because Beyonce endorsed you one time or Oprah did on a book one time. But the level of scale of how Current's leveraging influencer marketing is so systematic, so operationalized and brought down to the micro niches and the micro influencers. That's the part that I think you guys have really excelled at.

Adam:

Well, I think there's a really big difference there between the old version of celebrity endorsements and the system we have today. You've mentioned somebody like Oprah. She's actually maybe an early example of some of our modern influencer because she had distribution. It was within her control basically. Oprah, she was on ABC or something. I should know this. Maybe they technically had the distribution, but ultimately she had control. I guess she did. She started her own network. That's what really separates an influencer now and an influencer endorsement from let's say a celebrity endorsement 10 years ago, 20 years ago.

As much as if I even talk about somebody like Michael Jordan or Michael Jackson, these huge massive celebrities in the '80s, in the '90s, they actually couldn't reach anybody themselves. They were dependent on other outlets. If you talk about fast forward to today and you talk about an Instagramer or a YouTuber or even Beyonce herself who she was this conventional celebrity who existed 10 years ago and didn't have distribution. You fast forward today and that's been a huge strategy of hers is to own her own distribution, in the same way that a YouTuber or an Instagramer does.

Zach Johnson:

I want to know what's largest influencer deal you've done, Adam. It could be at Current. It could have been at a previous gig, but I want to know what's the largest influencer deal. You don't have to name who it is, but like-

Adam:

Yeah. Six figures. I haven't done anything in the seven figures as a deal yet. But yeah, certainly in the six figure range is where your tier one influencers fall-

Zach Johnson:

And how did you structure that?

Adam:

... for an individual promotion.

Zach Johnson:

How did you structure that deal? Was it literally like, "Hey, here's 200 grand. Here's 100 grand. I think this is going to work," or the art of the deal in influencer marketing, right?

Adam:

There's been a few, well many in that range. They've gotten there by different means, and it depends largely on the influencer and their priorities. I've been very flexible with my payment terms because that's one of the ways in which you get to work with influencers is being accommodating because everybody is trying to do it and how do you be competitive. You have influencers who are super risk averse and all they want is just a flat fee. "Hey, I want $1,000. I want $10,000. I want $100,000. Just write me the check and I'll do whatever you want and then that's it." You have other influencers who are more akin to incentives and taking a little bit of risk but seeing more upside.

So, though structured, it could be based on, let's say, views or impressions that they get on specific metrics within a certain timeframe. Maybe I'm a YouTuber and I'm like, "Okay well, I know that I can put out really great content that will do really well that will get millions of views. I can control that, so I want to align my incentives with that, which I can control." The most ambitious will go a step further than that and will want a revenue share or a piece, like a CPA type of deal. Now, of course, at that point, they're exposed to product risk and conversion risk. That means, hey if the landing page isn't working, they aren't making any money, but of course the upside on that will be the highest. So you really see everything in between and kind of hybrid approaches. I've always been pretty flexible around that.

Zach Johnson:

That's awesome. All right. Let's do this. What financial tips or principles would you have to an advertiser listening that's let's just say hasn't raised, how much has Current raised, like 50 some odd million dollars in venture capital. What good of advice would you have for somebody that's a little bit more cash flow conscious on diving into influencer marketing, and if they're not in a position to throw down multiple six figure contracts? There are advertisers listening on the show. They're spending anywhere from like 20 grand a month all the way up to two million a month, but they're not VC funded for the most of them.

Adam:

I would say, I mean I'd be very conscious of cash flows and as a business, influencer marketing isn't necessarily great for cash flow especially in that scenario which I described where you're just writing a flat rate check. Somebody executes. You then essentially have two curves that sit on top of each other. You incur all your cost on day zero and then the first curve that comes out is acquisition from the campaign. So, for simplicity's sake, let's say this. Well, you could have this be, let's say, an Instagram story or a Snapchat story. Something that just exists or a live stream. It exists, it happens and then it's over. In that case, it's a little bit simpler because all your acquisition is essentially going to happen in that moment in time or that 24-hour period.

A YouTube video is very different because it accumulates videos over time. Some are evergreen. They have all different types of curves. So, you have that initial curve from like hey, maybe you paid today but you're still getting user from it in three months, in six months, in nine months. Then you lay on your own LTV curve, your own monetization curve that occurs from once you acquire that customer. Again, in eCommerce, that will be fairly instantaneous. In a business that's more like banking or more like a game or a subscription service, et cetera, that's a lot longer. So, you might be talking about paying money today for a customer who joins in four months who only pays back 12 months after that or nine months or six months, whatever your pay back period is. It's not that friendly to a cash flow situation. So, I'm not sure if that's helpful, but it's just the reality.

Zach Johnson:

Yeah. I think that I've heard of some folks structuring their influencer deals where to get a tier one influencer, it has to be a six figure dollar amount, but that doesn't need to be 100, 200 grand cash upfront. We've heard of some folks structuring it as, as soon as you can get a risk profile, like you said, and show them very simply and clearly like, "Hey here's 10, 20 grand. 10, 20% down to know that we're serious, but also here's the upside participation." Doing that in a systematic way is pretty key. But also would say influencer, it's also lends itself to not being that great. It's not as simple as loading up a credit card into Facebook Ads and you're like, "I'm going to get a 30, 60-day float on this or net 60 terms."

Adam:

I mean, influencers are a small business just like you, so cash flow is important to them. So, you're not going to get those type of super long payment terms or at least the influencer is not going to want to do. Meaning you probably have to pay a premium and all the sort of stuff that comes along with that. So no, it's not a great fit for that. You mentioned structuring those influencer deals like that. It's really about kind of building trust. If your goal in structuring an influencer deal with let's say again like a revenue or a CPA portion of it is to save money, you're really not in the right business. Ultimately, you're just going to screw over the influencer. In that case, they aren't going to be happy. They're not going to work with you again and it's super shortsighted.

Your goal really should be mitigating risk and sharing risk. So, you should be able to prove to that influencer, "Hey, this is what this looks like at expectation. So, by sharing this risk with me, you're actually going to see more upside if you can execute." If you have that level that relationship, that level of trust, it can absolutely be really successful.

Zach Johnson:

That's awesome. All right. Let's move into this rich ad poor ad segment here. I think we should roll out some shady poor ads first. What do you think, Dylan?

Dylan Carpenter:

Yeah. We can totally dive into some. These are going to be some great ads to roast, Adam. I know you're looking forward to it. I would love to have open up that email and check out some of these terrible ads. By the way, I love how much you all's your customer. Some of you all's ads are very text message oriented and meme oriented. Oh my gosh. You hit right on the head when it comes to whoever is doing these actual ads here because man, they're funny.

Adam:

I appreciate the kind words. All right. So, where do we want to start? I haven't looked at these yet.

Dylan Carpenter:

Oh yes. All righty. So, would you like to go for the food oriented terrible ad or the back scratcher terrible ad first because they're both terrible?

Adam:

I'll start with the back scratcher.

Dylan Carpenter:

All right. All right. Just so everybody has some context, we have a random brand called [M-Brush 00:26:08]. Get your back brush now. Easy to get your back, keep your body clean. You want to grab it on Amazon? Place an order on Amazon. We will cover the full price for you. New Amazon accounts are not eligible for this offer. But hey, there's limited stock, so hurry. Now, this is a terrible ad. No product benefits. It's going to messenger as an ecomm brand. I love it. I hate it so much. It's kind of really good there but Adam, what are those first thoughts?

Adam:

Well, my first thought is the brush looks to be facing the wrong way. It looks I guess more like a back scratcher than a back brush. Maybe that they're advertising it. It's not super clear, although I am really happy that they have the nonslip grip because well nobody hates it more than you need to brush your back and the brush is slippy.

Zach Johnson:

Slippy.

Adam:

That's an everyday problem. It's a little bit of a ridiculous ad. This is super fascinating to me. As somebody who spends a lot of time agonizing over a copy, I'm not the best copywriter, I look at this and I'm like, "Wow." No real respect for any type of rules around capitalization or formatting.

Zach Johnson:

M-Brush.

Adam:

I appreciate there's limited stock, so hurry. Three exclamation points. It's interesting the new Amazon accounts are not eligible for this offer. There are probably some fraudulent problems going on there. I don't know. This is fascinating to me.

Dylan Carpenter:

Well, fun fact, this ad-

Zach Johnson:

I like how the headline... Go ahead. Go ahead.

Dylan Carpenter:

No. I was going to say, fun fact, this ad did over $3 million in sales which is totally BS. It did not. Who knows what it did.

Zach Johnson:

I don't believe you. I don't believe you. I mean, the headline says, "Get it today," which is just the worst headline. The call to action is the worst I think I've ever seen, "You want to grab one on Amazon?" It's like you're assuming that they want to get it on Amazon and then it just says, "Place an order on Amazon." This is just-

Adam:

This tells me that M-Brush is not a real company, not a real product. My guess is that they're some type of affiliate scheme here going on. But again, I'm unclear.

Dylan Carpenter:

Oh yeah, but you got nasty killer ad to roast. The next ad we have to roast everybody is a very well known brand who spends probably, shoot, 500K a day I feel like on ads, but they can get away with almost anything. You may have seen their ads on your news feed but we're going to introduce Wish. Now with this specific ad y'all, it's perfect for laying in bed eating sunflower seeds watching your phone. It's a terrible ad. The copy price drop from $1 to $1, a phenomenal deal. Enjoy the cheaper items sold by Wish. Now I'm speechless. Adam, go ahead. [inaudible 00:29:30] thoughts.

Adam:

All right. What I will say about this is I don't think it's a terrible ad as a reflection of the advertiser. If it's a terrible ad, it's a reflection of our tastes as consumers. But this is what I presume to be a dynamic product ad by Wish, meaning they've fed their catalog of thousands of products into Facebook with the corresponding creative and just allowed Facebook to say, "Hey, we're going to essentially show these and whatever performs best according to what we've chosen to optimize towards will get shown more."

Dylan Carpenter:

Oh, you're spot-on.

Adam:

Wish is notorious for these types of ads because they have all these wacky products. But what this does and me as an avid sunflower seed consumer myself, I'm like, "Wow, somebody thought of this," because really actually to be fair, I mainly eat them when I'm driving. So, I haven't incurred the same issue as man, I wish I had both hands free so I can watch this random Asian television show while eating sunflower seeds. But it certainly makes me think, man, Wish probably has some pretty revolutionary products that my Walmart is not really good at.

Zach Johnson:

Oh my gosh, this is hilarious. I had no idea. I didn't think you were such a sunflower seed fanatic. It's hilarious.

Adam:

These look like jumbo ones. They're a little bit longer. I'm happy with that.

Dylan Carpenter:

I did my research. This was the adding question without a doubt, you know.

Zach Johnson:

Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh. Yeah. Wish is like the-

Adam:

I was actually reading the copy now. It does say, "Price drop from $1 to $1." A little bit of a spacing error there. So, I was giving Wish a pass initially and blaming this more on just dynamic product ads and people's own tastes and algorithms, but come on.

Zach Johnson:

Zero percent off. I love it. All right. Let's dive into rich ad. Let's dive into it. Let's pull up some Current ads because I don't think there's a single losing ad here on Current's ad library here.

Adam:

Let me just stop you there. Plenty of losing ads on Current's library. If there weren't, we wouldn't be doing our job, right.

Zach Johnson:

Yeah, that's fair. I love it. Let's do it. Kick it off, Dylan.

Dylan Carpenter:

All right. But yeah, diving into these rich ads, I mean we'll go ahead and snag this one. You got a beautiful car that pops out, some nice overlaid sex. Get paid up to two days faster. Banking that gets you paid faster. Get paid. You have a very obvious message there when it comes to our audience here. I mean, it's very consistent. Sign up in less than two minutes, free overnight, overjet of $100 with overdrive. I mean, it's very consistent across all these different styles of copy but different videos more or less. Are those kind of the main end points you identified that really resonate with your audience?

Adam:

Yeah. Well, we're lucky in that one of our most population features is directly correlated with our KPI. It's getting paid faster. Look at the background on what that means. If you get paid on a weekly basis, let's say, every Friday, which is pretty typical of a lot of hourly jobs in America. The way that works is you work your weekly shift that ends on Sunday. Your employer then submits their payroll with their payroll provider, whoever that may be. That will usually hit a few intermediaries, but the federal reserve will send us a note, and essentially any bank a note, typically two days ahead of time saying, "Hey, Dylan is getting paid $500 on Friday." So, we have that note on Wednesday, meaning we can instantly credit you that amount on Wednesday knowing that with near 100% certainty that that money will actually fully settle with us by Friday.

So, if you talk about a traditional bank, this is against... they're incentivized not to do this because of how they make money, loaning out deposits. So actually flaunting money instead goes against that and no world ever wants to do this. But as a business that doesn't make money based on loaning out deposits, we can. So, that's how that all works and why it exists. Now what's really nice is well, how do you get paid faster by submitting your direct deposit? So, our core KPI is then aligned with one of our best features and most popular features. So, that's no coincidence why you see us advertising it.

Zach Johnson:

Yeah, but it's just so congruent throughout the funnel. How many bank ads have we seen where it's branding or you just inherit on the core feature of Current through and through really on all these ads in your ads' library. I'm looking at a few of them where you have it's just a text conversation with some bubbles and just phenomenal use of emojis. Hats off to you guys on the emojis funnel, emoji ad.

Adam:

It's direct response. You have to be able to convey value props and that's what's going to make people take action. Now, that said, being on brand is very, very important to us as well. I mentioned the bit on trust and how important that is. That's all part of brand building. People don't want to bank with some random bank they've never heard of, some bank that they don't think it's relevant to them, which again when you talk about 50% of this country, most bank ads are very irrelevant to them. You're probably highlighting maybe a 45-year-old white woman in a pant suit getting a cup of coffee or something, which is like the reality for one half of America but not the reality for the other half. So, I'd say being relevant is really, really key to our advertising.

Zach Johnson:

Now, all your headlines say, "Overdraft up to $100 for free." I mean, that's mind-blowing in several ways of what bank would ever have the balls to say, "Yeah, if you overdraft, we want you as a customer." So, that's a really big testament to product that you're actually able to advertise to somebody that's overdrafting. So, the ground work's been laid for you there. But how does that overdraft, how does that even work? I guess is more of a product question.

Adam:

I mean, it's again functionally for those who don't know, what typically happens if you're with a traditional bank, you have $6 left in your account. You swipe for 20 bucks, your account will go negative 14 bucks. They'll allow the swipe to go through, but then hit you with a $35 overdraft on that. Let's say again you swipe again for $4, get a quarter pound from McDonald's, you'll get hit with another $35 fees. So, now you've paid $70 to access 15 bucks or so. Again, that series continue without even notification.

So, this may happen unknowingly where it's you didn't even know that you were overdrafting and all of a sudden you owe $105 in overdraft fees. But more often than many would think has happened knowingly because hey, the reality is you're paycheck to paycheck. You don't have any money in your bank account. You don't get paid for two more days and you either have the choice of buying groceries for your family, getting diapers, feeding yourself or not. So, you're willing to pay that $35 which is a terrible place to be in. Essentially, it's predatory and it's awful.

We can't solve all the problems of financial inequality in the U.S., but we can solve this one. So, we do that to folks who direct deposit with us overdraft and overdraft for free. It's a two-way trust system. They've entrusted with being able to pull their money and giving us their paycheck. We've entrusted them that hey if we let them overdraft, they'll stick with us and their next paycheck will come through and they'll repay that. That's what we've seen overwhelmingly. So, it's a two-way trust that goes on there.

Zach Johnson:

Yeah. I mean, I think about all the advertising campaigns that could have existed for Current, right. I'm on your guys' site right now that says, "The bank for modern life." It looks like this hiphop recording artist is holding out the banking card.

Adam:

[inaudible 00:39:48].

Zach Johnson:

Yeah. It's awesome. But a non-direct response advertiser who would have went down the direction of like okay we need to have every influencer just carrying our card. It would have been very easy to fall into we have to brand Current and just go all in on brand, right. You've done a ton of trust and built your brand through influencer marketing, but you're late into everybody just loves bank fees. There's such a visceral response I think.

Adam:

It's really I consider ourselves fortunate in that we're ultimately, we're stealing customers from businesses that don't want them. I think that's the real point here is that you're not seeing Bank of America or Citi Bank, HSBC, you name it, these guys are not upset that we're stealing these customers from them. They're making it very easy. Again, put it this way. If you were to start a bank today, who in their mind would think, "You know what, we need 10,000 physical brick and mortar stores across the United States, especially in a pandemic. That's a great idea." It's mind-blowing, but yet they've cut them open. That's still their business model. It's like the status score head has through there. It's just like an insane expensive bloated product that doesn't make sense for most of this country and definitely doesn't make sense for really anybody in 2020 to do that. It's a lot of low-hanging fruit out there.

Zach Johnson:

Yeah. Well, there you have it. There is your rich ad poor ad segment. Adam, you've been a awesome guest on the show. You guys are going to go check out Current. I mean, over $50 million raised of VC money, 1.2 plus million users, over a billion dollars in deposits. I mean, you guys, I know we're not talking about numbers today, but you got to be spending seven, eight figures to make seven figures a month on influencers and ads. But we'll leave those secret numbers close to the chest today. But Adam, for those that are listening that might be either influencers themselves or affiliates or advertisers, how can they support you and where can they get in touch?

Adam:

The number one way they could support me would be to either join or refer someone to join our team here. We're based in New York, downtown Manhattan. The team is growing pretty fast. We're about 45 people here, which is well over double from when I joined. We can't keep on acquiring all these customers and building all these products without more people. So, that will be the number one way I'd say. Current.com/careers.

Zach Johnson:

That's awesome. If you're a media buyer and ad agency that's just burned out on live from COVID and you want to get into influencer marketing, check out Current. That's awesome. Well, thanks Adam. You've been awesome. Thanks so much for being on the show.

Adam:

I appreciate it guys. Thanks so much.

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About The Podcast

Jason Hornung is the founder and Creative Director at JH Media LLC, the world’s #1 direct response advertising agency focusing exclusively on the Facebook ads platform. Jason’s proprietary methods for ad creation, audience selection and scaling are responsible for producing $20 million + of profitable sales for his clients EVERY YEAR

Zach Johnson

Zach Johnson is Founder of FunnelDash, the Agency Growth and Finance Company, with their legendary Clients Like Clockwork solutions. Under Zach’s leadership, FunnelDash has grown to over 5,000+ agency customers managing over $1 Billion in ad spend across 41,000 ad accounts on. Zach’s private clients have included influencers such as Dr. Axe, Marie Forleo, Dan Kennedy, Dean Graziozi to name a few. Zach is also a noted keynote speaker and industry leader who’s now on a mission to partner with agencies to fund $1 Billion in ad spend over the next 5 years.

Dylan Carpenter

Dylan Carpenter

Dylan Carpenter will be diving into what he and his team are seeing in 200+ accounts on Google and Facebook when it comes to trends, new offerings, and new opportunities. With over $10 million in Facebook/Instagram ad spend, Dylan Carpenter had the pleasure to work with Fortune 500 companies, high investment start-ups, non-profits, and local businesses advertising everything from local services to physical and digital products. Having worked at Facebook as an Account Manager and now with 5+ years of additional Facebook Advertising under my belt, I’ve worked alongside 60+ agencies and over 500+ businesses. I work with a team of Facebook, Google, and LinkedIn experts to continue to help companies and small businesses leverage the power of digital marketing.

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