OnePay CEO Omer Ismail on fixing money for 150 million Americans

Omer Ismail is the CEO of OnePay, the Walmart-backed fintech that has become one of the largest neobanks in the country, with millions of users, tens of billions of dollars in annualized payments, and a valuation of around $4 billion. Before OnePay, he spent nearly two decades at Goldman Sachs, where he built and ran Marcus, the firm's consumer bank. In this episode of Summation, Omer and Auren discuss: Why customers asked OnePay to hide their savings from themA teen bank account that hands k...

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Experience is overrated. I will always choose hunger and grit over experience.

• 0:06Auren Hoffman?

  Hello, fellow data nerds. My guest today is Omar Ismail. Omar is the CEO of OnePay.

• 0:12Speaker 00

  I think if you think about hundreds of millions of Americans, they are still worried about giving financial information or access to your full bank account or to your full credit card to an agent that could hallucinate. We have created instead of OnePay Banking, a subaccount. And we call it, you know, the bank account for your agent.

• 0:33Auren Hoffman?

  Hello, fellow data nerds. My guest today is Omar Ismail. Omar is the CEO of OnePay, the Walmart-backed fintech that has become one of the largest neo-banks in the country with millions of users and tens of billions of annualized payments and recently valued at around $4 billion. Before OnePay, Omar spent nearly two decades at Goldman Sachs where he built and ran the firm's consumer bank, Marcus. Omar, welcome to Summation.

• 0:58Speaker 00

  Orin, it's great to be here. Thanks for having me.

• 1:00Auren Hoffman?

  I'm super excited. Okay, now, okay, just this is the stupidest question I want to run off the bat. Like, why is there a difference between a checking account and a savings account? Like, is it just because like the banks are trying to like screw with you and you just kind of have to move your money and stuff? Like, why can't it just be like one thing and earn some interest?

• 1:19Speaker 00

  I think that there are regulatory reasons to do it. For legacy banks, there may be reasons to do it where there's a little bit of a value arbitrage. But I do think also, if I, you know, our own research would suggest if you talk to consumers, they do think about these things a little bit separately, right? They think about their checking account as the account that they are using for daily use. And then they think about their savings account as money that they've stashed away. Obviously, those two things are a dollar is a dollar, money is fungible. You can move money from savings account to checking account. You can move money from checking account to savings account.

• 2:00Speaker 00

  I'll share one story with you because I do think it's interesting and it speaks a little bit to like customer research. So we actually show our customers a total dollar amount between their checking and their savings. We just show $1 amount, right? You have whatever, $2,000 between, between, you know, kind of each of these two pockets of money. And we actually heard from a lot of customers that by showing one amount, like, I'd rather kind of hide my savings away from myself.

• 2:30Auren Hoffman?

  But why can't they, I mean, if they really want to hide it, they could put it, they could put it in like a bond fund or something like that or whatever that is a little bit higher interest thing. Or, you know, you can help them do, you know, do something like, why, why have these kind of? Because then it's like, it's like, okay, we're paying zero interest on the checking. We're paying whatever, 4% on the savings. Then you constantly have to move the money around to get the optimal thing. It's like, why don't we just treat the consumers as an adult? And okay, you have one thing, instead of zero and four, it's 3.8 blended or something. And you get what you get and it's good for you.

• 3:05Speaker 00

  I would say two things on that, Orin, and I love where this conversation is going because we're like digging right deep into it already. I think the first is, you know, you and I, you know, are lucky and grateful enough to be able to think like investing instruments like bond funds and others, right? And for a lot of customers, tens of millions, hundreds of millions of customers in the US, like, you know, so many of them are living paycheck to paycheck and having access to those types of investing instruments is just not, is not possible. It's probably not even the right way to quote unquote, save money. That's the first thing. The second is, you know, we're diving deep into product.

• 3:46Speaker 00

  But I actually think in some ways like this is a type of problem that AI is going to solve. You know, when you think about this idea that you can have a financial agent, we've launched one of ours called Penny. And the idea is that Penny will be able to, you know, look at Orin's account, look at the amount of money that you probably need on a daily or a weekly basis in order to manage your ongoing payments, but then can tell you, you know what? You have extra money sitting in your, you know, 0% earning checking account and it really should be in your, you know, we call it savings pocket.

• 4:22Auren Hoffman?

  And I'll rebalance every day for you or whatever.

• 4:25Speaker 00

  In the early days of fintech, you would have, you know, a types of apps that were called personal financial management apps. You may have been familiar with one called Mint as an example.

• 4:35Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah, of course.

• 4:36Speaker 00

  15 years ago, 20 years ago.

• 4:37Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah, the OG, yeah.

• 4:38Speaker 00

  Exactly, the OG. And all Mint would do was tell you, hey, you have extra money sitting. You should be, you should go ahead and move it. But it stopped at insights. And what, you know, agentic payments, what agentic finance allows you to do is your financial agent won't just give you that insight, it can actually do it for you, right? With your permission. And that's candidly an area that we're really excited about as a new entrance in the space.

• 5:06Auren Hoffman?

  If you just think of like people who are living paycheck to paycheck, like they are, you know, the, the best thing that they could do is just like save money, stop paying fees on things, et cetera. So this is where like an agent could really help you. It's like, oh, I see your Verizon bill is this, like, it should be, it should be 20% lower. I can just do these three things for you and get it 20% lower. I see you're overpaying this thing or you paid this thing twice and I'm gonna get you the refund on this, right? So it could, it could really help. Like, I could imagine almost every consumer could probably save like an extra thousand, few thousand dollars a year with a good agent. Like, that would be amazing.

• 5:44Speaker 00

  One of the questions, Orin, that we get asked a lot, I get asked a lot, is like, what is your biggest competition? Is it new fintech entrance? Is it the legacy banks? And I always say like, actually, our biggest competition is customer inertia, right? It's like, we, you know, there are, as you said, you know, tens of millions, hundreds of millions of Americans that, you know, could be saving more because they are paying extra in areas where they shouldn't be or their money isn't working as hard for them as it should be. And, you know, again, I think that this is really, there's so much been talked about the promise of AI in the rails, right? And I'm not suggesting the rails aren't important, you know?

• 6:28Speaker 00

  Are we in the singularity? Are we not in the singularity? AGI here, AGI not here, right? MCP servers, CLIs, like, we can talk all about that. To me, the promise of AI is how are we going to make people's lives better? Like, our mission, OnePay's mission is better money makes life better. And the promise of AI in my mind is the types of use cases that you mentioned, which is lower someone's bills, cancel your subscriptions, pay off high cost debt so that, you know, you can refinance it lower, earn, earn more on your savings. By the way, it's not just money that's extra money that's sitting in your checking account. How about we just take a portion of your paycheck directly? We call it pay, auto, save, right?

• 7:12Speaker 00

  And so 5% or 10%, whatever the right number is for you, automatically goes in your savings. So those are the types of things that, you know, we're investing in in ways that we can serve customers.

• 7:21Auren Hoffman?

  And also like, let's get rid of all these stupid fees, like $20 fee for this overdraft thing, like, you know, or, you know, these wire fees that you're out there, that you keep moving money. If you're moving money to friends or something, like, let's, let's make it like, I feel the, the, the, the lower the income person, it seems like the more fees, more fees they have to pay, which is, should be the opposite.

• 7:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, there's, there's no question that the legacy financial services system is overridden with fees.

• 7:52Auren Hoffman?

  Especially like payday loan guys and stuff, like, if you know someone's got a good decent job and you know they're gonna get a check like in two weeks, like, let's, let's help them out. Let's, like, no sense like getting these guys in like the, I'm gonna go to the pawn shop or, you know, whatever they have to do today to, if they have like, because sometimes you, you need an extra few hundred bucks. There's an emergency that comes in, like, we should be able to get them that in a very cheap way.

• 8:18Speaker 00

  100%. Giving value back to customers, making products incredibly simple, you know, is really, is really the promise of, you know, of OnePay and, you know, why we wake up every single day trying to serve customers with better products.

• 8:32Auren Hoffman?

  What is like the one simple change, either like how money works, the banking system works, that would like most help the average American?

• 8:39Speaker 00

  Let me take it a little bit high level because honestly, product to product, it could matter. Like, access to credit or building credit, you know, may be different than how you think about investing. But the areas, Orin, that we focus on is one, you know, the financial services system in the US and the regulatory system is complex. And our job is how do we hide all of the complexity from the customer to make products incredibly simple and easy to understand? You know, the, the, a little bit of the mantra inside OnePay

• 9:20Speaker 00

  that all of us talk about is, are, would we be comfortable with our family member, my mom, my sister, using these products or not? Like, that is the best, right? Simple, simple, simple, simple. That's one. Two is, we have got to give customers value, right? Again, to your point, you know, there's a lot of fees, there's a lot of, you know, interest being charged for payday loans and others, right? And so, again, it could be different depending on fees and invest or, you know, 100% plus interest rates in access to credit. But how do we give value back to the customers? And a little bit of OnePay's promise by virtue of how we're set up

• 10:05Speaker 00

  and this competitive advantage that we have in distribution and the ability to acquire customers at low customer acquisition costs allows us to give value back to the customer. And then the third area where I think, you know, we need to work on as an industry and we're spending a lot of time doing or trying to do so at OnePay is, you know, financial services products should not be a one size fits all, right? How do we make products like, and I think, again, AI helps this. We've been talking about it for a long time, but I think truly the moment has arrived in order to do this, which is let's make products personalized to who the customer is, right?

• 10:46Speaker 00

  I'll give you like a really good example. Like, I could give a customer a generic 1% off or 2% off when you use our debit card or our credit card, right?

• 10:54Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 10:54Speaker 00

  We've all seen those points. But if I know that, Orin,

• 11:00Speaker 00

  Is saving money to be able to buy a bike for his son. And you've set up a savings goal of $400. Just making it up because that's the bike that you want to buy for your son. And how about when you get to 390, we top you up and give you the extra $10 so that now

• 11:19Speaker 00

  right? So we let our customers set up savings pockets for goals that they have. It could be a honeymoon. It could be, you know, just any other trip with their, with their family member. It could be a bike they want to buy for their son. Like that personalized reward, when you know that your financial services institution or your fintech knows you, like, is so much more valuable to you than like the generic reward. And so those are the areas. How do we make them simple? How do we give customers back value? And how do we make it truly personalized so that we're serving an N of one?

• 11:52Auren Hoffman?

  Everyone's life is actually really complicated financially. So even if you have very little income, a woman used to work with, work from, work with me, her father passed away. And it was just like, there was just so hard to deal with his, he didn't have very much, but he had little pockets of benefits here and he was in the army. So he had some pockets of benefits there and he had a little saving over, you know, and it was just like, it just, and then he obviously had some debts and obligations that had to be taken care of. It became a job just to deal with this thing. Like, can we get all that in one place? So, you know, if you pass, your loved ones could take it and take it over and make it easy.

• 12:35Auren Hoffman?

  Like, can we, can we make that easier for people?

• 12:38Speaker 00

  If you think about fintech 1.0, and again, we started with Mint, which was one of the earliest, you know, players in the space. It's been all about point-to-point solutions, right? It's been about, you want a checking account, go here. You want to get a buy now, pay later loan, because that's a better way to finance a purchase, go here. You want to trade, you know, you want to buy equities and get access to the market, go here, right? And when we think about the next generation of fintech companies that will serve tens of millions of customers, they are going to be the ones that are going to own holistic wallets of their customers and try to create a one-stop shop for consumers to manage their money.

• 13:23Auren Hoffman?

  Which by the way, means they can't do everything, which means like, if there's a better buy now, pay later, like, use that one. Don't do mine, you know? So that means you, which is hard, because you have to really take the customer, say, okay, the customer's best and I can't be preferring my product to what's out there.

• 13:39Speaker 00

  And by the way, it doesn't mean that every customer is going to use you for everything, right? However, we as a platform need to aspire to help customers across their financial life. So I'll give you a good example. One of the products that we just launched very recently is, you know, you could always set up a OnePay banking account where you would have, you know, access to, you know, the full features of a digital bank. But what we just launched is the ability for, inside of OnePay, for you to open a teen banking account. So now my 14-year-old son, by the way, it's a very interesting experience having your son be a user of a product that, you know, your team's helped creating, because I feel

• 14:24Speaker 00

  like I'm getting daily feedback from him at night about things he'd like to see in the product. But that's a great example of, prior to OnePay having launched teen banking, I would have had to pick any, you know, another platform, another fintech out there in order to set up an account for, you know, my teen, as did millions of our other customers.

• 14:45Auren Hoffman?

  I use a teen banking account for my kids and it's like insanely high fees. I don't even know what they charge, but it's very expensive that, you know, and I, I just do it because I just thought it'd be cool to have, for them to have a checking account, so they can learn about it. Be great to have a very low fee or no fee account for them, so they get used to it.

• 15:06Speaker 00

  Switch to ours, it's free.

• 15:08Auren Hoffman?

  Okay, I'm switching. I didn't even know that. I'm, I'm gonna be, I'm literally writing a note to myself right now, like, move to OnePay.

• 15:14Speaker 00

  Nice.

• 15:15Auren Hoffman?

  For my kids. Okay, done.

• 15:18Speaker 00

  Switch to ours, it's free. And the focus is not even, or just on the bank account, although that is the core. We allow teens to, you know, with appropriate permissions with the parents, allow them to start investing. So you can start, you know, your teen can start early on their investing journey. We actually have built it on, this is, this is, by the way, is a great example of something I was saying earlier, which is hiding the complexity from the customer. So I'll share the complexity with you, but then tell you what the value proposition is for the customer. We've actually built the teen banking account on secured credit card rails. And what that means is that we can collect the teen's banking history data and by the

• 16:02Speaker 00

  time he or she turns 18, we can report that to the credit bureau.

• 16:06Auren Hoffman?

  Uh, that's awesome.

• 16:07Speaker 00

  So that your teen will already have a credit score when they turn 18.

• 16:11Auren Hoffman?

  That's amazing.

• 16:12Speaker 00

  You and I were talking offline, I came to the US from Pakistan when I was 18 years old and I did not, I didn't even have a social security number, let alone a credit history. And so as an, as an immigrant, you know, one of the first things I had to do was open a bank account, try to get a small credit line so that I could, you know, eventually build enough of a credit history so I could get a credit card and, and get access to other forms of credit. So we know that's a real pain point for people who are new to credit or turn 18. And so we've built a product that allows teens to be able to build their credit while they have the OnePay bank account.

• 16:48Auren Hoffman?

  Can I give you my gripe about neo-banks in the US and maybe you could tell me how this is wrong? So I've had this scenario happen many times where I'm using a neo-bank and, and basically what happens is the neo-bank is using another bank on the backend. And so I've got like a routing number and I've got a checking account number that goes into like that other bank. And then, you know, then every once in a while, they're like, they'll switch the bank and then they say, hey, by the way, you gotta switch your routing number and your checking account for all these things. And it's like, super annoying. Maybe if I had an agent do it all for me, it would be less annoying, but it's super annoying. How do we like, how do we just get these neo-banks to get their own routing number and their own checking account so that we don't have to like, have all this like weird

• 17:33Auren Hoffman?

  complexity?

• 17:34Speaker 00

  We, like the neo-bank that we mentioned, partner with licensed banks. We have two, Coastal Community Bank and Lead Bank that we partner with. In order to provide banking services, we OnePay ourselves are.

• 17:46Auren Hoffman?

  And by the way, the CEO of Lead Bank has been on this podcast, Jackie. She's amazing. Yeah.

• 17:51Speaker 00

  Jackie's, you know, Jackie's a good friend, has been a great partner, as has Coastal Community Bank. I think that it comes down, or to the following, which is one, partnering with banks allow us to offer our customers protections that come, like, you know, for example, FDIC insurance. That's, that's incredibly important. That's one.

• 18:13Auren Hoffman?

  Yep.

• 18:14Speaker 00

  The second is, I go back to, how do we hide complexity from the customer, right? And so we've not been in the, we've not had the experience of having to switch, you know, our banking partners. Yeah. And so our customers have not had to switch their account numbers and their routing numbers and others. So I can't speak to the experience that you had. But if something like that were to happen, our job, you know, is how do we hide complexity from the customer so that, you know, we give you the benefits of being able to offer you banking services banked by an FDIC insurance bank like Lead or Coastal Clarity and make the experience as simple and easy for you as a customer as possible.

• 18:54Auren Hoffman?

  And why can't you be registered? Like, why is it so hard for, and you guys have tons of customers, you are a very valuable part of the, the financial enterprise in America? Like, why can't we give, get you your own routing number like, like any other bank has? Like, why is it so hard?

• 19:14Speaker 00

  I think that every fintech, and I can't speak for everyone, but I'll speak for us, which is makes its own decision as to whether or not you want to be a licensed bank or whether or not you want to partner with licensed banks in order to provide financial services to our customers. And we have made the decision. That the partnership model where the likes of Coastal Community Bank and Lead Bank that are very good at what they do. They know what they're, they know what they're doing. They're great partners. We can provide banking services to our customers while partnering with them in order to do the things that we're really good at.

• 19:57Speaker 00

  You know, creating the UI, creating the experience, creating a one-stop shop for consumers to manage their money and partner with them in order to provide some of the core banking services. That has, you know, made sense for us. Now, if somebody else might choose to make a different equation or a different assessment as to whether or not they want to become a bank themselves or not, for us, it hasn't, it hasn't made sense.

• 20:20Auren Hoffman?

  Essentially, you're kind of like creating a super app. I'm like, you know, there's like WeChat in China, there's other super apps in other countries. What have you learned from these other super apps in other countries to bring that learning here to the US?

• 20:36Speaker 00

  You'll be familiar with this, but like the term "super app" gets thrown around a lot. Sometimes, you know, I was in Singapore a couple of weeks ago and met with the Grab team as an example.

• 20:45Auren Hoffman?

  Grab is amazing.

• 20:46Speaker 00

  Really great example. A lot of super apps in Asia and other parts of the world are like what I'd call like super, super apps, right? The way we think about ourselves. They do everything, right? The way we think, the way we think about it here for OnePay is more of a, what I would call a financial services super app. We want to help consumers manage every aspect of their money, but not every aspect of their life per se. Right? I would say a few things that we've learned. One, and it goes back a little bit to our competitive advantages. One, distribution incredibly important. If you think about, you know, in the US here, we have partnered with Walmart.

• 21:29Speaker 00

  Hundred and fifty million weekly shoppers, million and a half customers. Ninety percent of the US lived within ten miles of one. You know, hundreds of billions of dollars of GMV where millions of people are paying Walmart. We have the ability to use that ecosystem to acquire customers into our financial services platform, OnePay, at zero customer acquisition cost.

• 21:52Auren Hoffman?

  If your CACs go to zero, all of a sudden you can get your fees very close to zero too.

• 21:57Speaker 00

  You can give value back to the customer and you can have that, you know, that can be your flywheel of, of continuing to serve customers millions across their entire financial life. The second is data. Like, how many times have you had the example, Orin, where you're already a user of a particular bank or a particular financial services provider? And when you try to open another account with that same provider, it's almost as if they know nothing about you.

• 22:26Auren Hoffman?

  Totally. Right. I mean, come on. Yeah.

• 22:30Speaker 00

  Why? Like, so I'll try to simplify this for you. Our philosophy is we will never ask the customer a question to an answer that we already know. Right? So if you happen to be, if you, you know, opened a credit card with us first, if now you want to open a OnePay banking account or you want to start investing your money, there might be incremental questions that we never asked you before, like suitability requirements that we now need to ask because you're opening an invest account. But everything that you already provided us, your name, your address, your social security number, your income, like we're not going to ask you those questions.

• 23:06Auren Hoffman?

  By the way, the other thing that's super annoying is the KYC stuff. It's like, I gotta, so I gotta scan my face again? I gotta upload my driver's license again? I mean, I've already done this. Like, why do I have to do this the second time? You know?

• 23:18Speaker 00

  Distribution and data are, you know, kind of two lessons learned from the power of data, two lessons learned from, you know, super apps outside the US. And then the third, honestly, is financial services is all about, at the end of the day, it's about trust. You are trusting us with your information, you are trusting us with your money. You want your money to be available to you when you want it. And the area that we're investing, you know, a lot of time and attention is, you know, you want to have great products with great product market fit and you're giving value back to the customer, but you've got to build your brand. And, you know, that's, that's the other area that I would say the other super apps outside the US have done a great job of and, and we're investing heavily in it.

• 24:01Auren Hoffman?

  Now, if you were going to give product feedback to, like, there, there are all these companies that, that I'm sure you interact with that help the fintechs work. The Stripes of the world, the Plads of the world, et cetera. If you're going to give feedback to them, to how to make their products better, like, what do you wish those guys did to make your life easier?

• 24:24Speaker 00

  You know, it's a great question. Obviously Stripe very different than Plaid. Like, there's so many, there's so many, you know, different kind of players in the ecosystem. You know, I would say that, you know, data is still very disaggregated in the US. You know, like account linking, Plaid is obviously a great partner of ours. Been, you know, we've had a great partnership with them. I've known the team for incredibly long time. Have a lot of respect for them. You know, they're spending a lot of their time trying to figure out how to go from ninety percent or ninety-five percent to a hundred percent accuracy. And some of it is in that control and some of it's just not in that control. You know, so, so that's kind of like one area.

• 25:06Speaker 00

  The other area where, you know, the players like Stripe and others are investing very heavily is, you know, making money movement real time. And, you know, that's another area that, again, we're in like 2026, but, you know, moving money through ACH rails can still take forty-eight hours.

• 25:23Auren Hoffman?

  Even trades take a day to, to settle and stuff, right?

• 25:28Speaker 00

  So, you know, the players in the space, whether it's 24/7 settlement, whether it's real-time money movement with stable coins or Fed Now and others, like, you know, some of it is in the control of, you know, these players and they're, they're obviously pushing the boundaries. And they move incredibly fast, as, as do we. Some of it's obviously, you know, more out of their control and it's, it's more of an industry-wide phenomenon.

• 25:51Auren Hoffman?

  Are you like just helping give someone some advice? Okay, so let's say, I don't know, like, okay, like the, the new Trump accounts. Okay, it's like, hey, it's like a, you have a kid, it's like a free thousand dollars for you. Like, make sure you do, like, are you just reminding people to do those things and help them along?

• 26:09Speaker 00

  I would say that, you know, again, it goes back to, how do you give customers actionable insights about their financial life in their moment knowing who they are and their data? And, Orin, the area where we are investing there is in our personal AI agent, Penny. Right? So if I know, again, you could be saving extra, saving extra from your paycheck. You know, investing might make sense for you. You could do certain things in order to improve your credit score or to build your credit. Right?

• 26:47Speaker 00

  Penny is our AI agent where we are going to give you both the financial insight and do it for you. I'll give you like a, just a really simple example, but honestly, it really brings us to life. So if you've ever tried to fill gas with a debit card, usually the gas station will put like a hundred dollar hold on your account. You might only fill gas for forty dollars or forty-five dollars. And that, that remaining amount of money, believe it or not, is going to get released when that actual payment clears through the network. Mastercard, Visa, whatever the network is. That might take twenty-four hours.

• 27:33Speaker 00

  Right? If Penny can proactively tell you that, hey, Orin, there's an extra hold on your account that's going to clear as soon as the, the transaction clears, that can be really anxiety-reducing for somebody that thinks I got overcharged by, you know? So, again, very small example of the types of things that, you know, we can invest in and really help our customers, you know, across their financial journey.

• 28:03Auren Hoffman?

  Going back to like the idea of like, okay, having kids, like, there's probably a lot of things that people should be doing in that scenario. I assume with spending data, you could like very easily make a determination that someone is about to have a kid. It's probably like really easy to figure that out really quickly. And you could potentially like help them along. Hey, here are some things you should be doing. Here's a bunch of things you should do for your kid. Here are some ways that you could set your kid up for success. It's early, you know, mentioned like, you know, hey, free thousand dollars on Instagram, which actually may be free, like, you know, depending on your zip code, it could be like two, three, four thousand dollars right now, right? Depending on what's going on. You get a share of SpaceX, you get the two hundred and fifty dollars from Michael Dell. It's like, oh, I'm like, you know, it starts to compound.

• 28:48Auren Hoffman?

  There's probably all these other things, like, can you proactively, or are you allowed to like proactively look at the data and then help them along and give them some advice based on that?

• 28:57Speaker 00

  I don't know about that, but specific use case, like, looked at the spend data to know someone's about to have a kid or not.

• 29:04Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah, it's a little creepy, but also could be really useful.

• 29:07Speaker 00

  I, I don't know about that use case. I don't think specifically, you know, on that one. But for a customer that is creating spending, that's what we call it, spending pockets, to save money for a goal, right? If, we know that they've named it Buy a Ring, right? They have created a spending pocket inside of the OnePay app where we know what they are saving for. It's very obvious. Like, people share information with us and we can help them on that. You know, we can help them on that financial journey. I'll give you another product that we launched, which, you know, honestly has really surprised me too. With very, very, very little marketing, then, you know, hundreds of thousands of customers

• 29:49Speaker 00

  that have signed up inside of our app, it's called My Garage. And the idea behind my garage was really simple. It's like for millions, tens of millions of customers, right? Their car is their largest financial asset.

• 30:05Auren Hoffman?

  Yep.

• 30:06Speaker 00

  Many cases, you know, people don't own homes. Car is really their largest asset. All we said was, tell us what car you have, right? By the way, you like get to pick the car model and the color and stuff. And it's got a nice UI around it. People get excited about seeing their, you know, depiction of that car in the app. And then how about we now, now that we know what car you have, how about we help you save on car insurance?

• 30:30Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 30:31Speaker 00

  How about we tell you gas offers that are close to your house?

• 30:34Auren Hoffman?

  Hmm.

• 30:35Speaker 00

  How about we tell you, you know, just pull the, the, the available information on the value of the car. So that now you can see, you know, just based on law of averages, what your car is worth. Hundreds of thousands of customers have basically signed up for my garage.

• 30:53Auren Hoffman?

  I assume you can take it like six steps further. It's like, okay, like, hey, you haven't paid your registration to the state. You, you need a smog check, like we can get you that, like, you know, uh, you may, maybe you need the VIN number or maybe you need the license plate. Uh, you have these overdue tickets or something like that. And that's gonna like cause you some issues. So can we help you on these parking tickets or, you know, whatever speeding ticket that you have, et cetera?

• 31:18Speaker 00

  You've, you've really been in our product meetings, like honestly, it's like, no, I'm not, I'm not like, it's a surface area that really allows us to do, you know, some of the things you mentioned, you know, we are in fact working on, which is okay. We start with car insurance. How about car finance, refinancing? You know, how about you wanna go replace your tires? Like you can, the surface area is very large.

• 31:40Auren Hoffman?

  You have a dent in your car, let's get, let's, let's get it fixed. Can we help you? Cause you know, and let's not, you get, make sure you don't get taken advantage of and, you know, et cetera.

• 31:49Speaker 00

  So many financial apps are just about like, or apps in general, platforms in general are like about selling you like the next product. And like, how about you like just put the customer at the center of, and in this particular case, you know, the largest asset that they own at the center of their life? And then try to build products and services around that that can help them.

• 32:12Auren Hoffman?

  Now you, you guys also started a wireless service, which I wouldn't have like necessarily have thought, but it kinda makes sense to me. Like what have you learned from that journey?

• 32:22Speaker 00

  I would say, you know, so one of my philosophies on launching product and just overall on, you know, uh, how we operate in the company is, uh, you know, kind of one-way doors and two-way doors, right? And we really thought of, you know, or and I talked about, you know, we think of ourselves as financial services super app. Everything that we have done has been around money. I would say what, you know, uh, partnering with gigs, um, which is a rivet portfolio company. And rivet's a very large investor in One Pay. You know, partnering with gigs, uh, in order to launch a wireless plan is, you know, a little bit of like a two-way door.

• 33:01Speaker 00

  Let's see if there is good product market fit for our customers to, um, you know, find a cheaper, better wireless plan that they can manage inside of the One Pay app. And oh, by the way, we know that they will use One Pay financial products in order to set up, you know, um, auto pay on the wireless plan. And it kinda becomes a little bit of like, uh, um, you know, a, um, a circle kind of inside of our app. You get access to a cheap wireless plan. You have the ability to, you know, use a One Pay bank account or one of the other One Pay, you know, um, uh, credit products in order to pay off the wireless plan and, and we can, you know, deepen our relationship with the customer.

• 33:44Speaker 00

  I would say we're pretty early, like we have, you know, thousands of customers that have signed up for it. But it was, it was definitely like our way of, I would say experimenting and testing, you know, just a little bit of the boundaries, uh, outside of kind of financial services out, inside of our platform.

• 34:04Auren Hoffman?

  Okay, I'm gonna pitch you another product to help.

• 34:06Speaker 00

  Tell me.

• 34:07Auren Hoffman?

  Cause this, this is, this like really annoys me that all people like, people like you and I, we have access to legal services. We have access, you know, and but, but I, I've met so many people who just have been completely taken advantage of. Like, I, I think you should give them like a free lawyer in their pocket. And it just reviews things, okay, you're getting a rental agreement. It reviews the rental agreement. Um, your employer's trying to make you sign this, you know, uh, weird non-compete or something. And you're making $25 an hour. Maybe you shouldn't be signing this non-compete, she can't work for anybody. You know, uh, may, and maybe even give them free docs, like, okay, they, they need a will. Um, you, you need, everyone should have a will, like, let's give them a free will.

• 34:51Auren Hoffman?

  Um, like they shouldn't have to like go to a lawyer and the lawyer charge them thousands of dollars for this will, like, you know, this, something like that to really help you. I, I just get, I get really mad when these people get taken advantage of.

• 35:02Speaker 00

  I took some notes, I wrote it down. Let me, let me, uh, you know, let, let me, let me, let me throw it in the hopper of product.

• 35:09Auren Hoffman?

  Okay, perfect, alright, great, great.

• 35:11Speaker 00

  Uh, you know, and, uh, yeah.

• 35:13Auren Hoffman?

  One of the things I love about companies like you and just in general about like the tech stuff is like, we can really empower, again, like you and I, like, we have a lot of opportunities. We, we can do a lot of things. We have a lot of, we can do, we can do stuff. We've got teams, you know, et cetera. I got, I got, I got stacks of trusts that I don't even understand, right? We have all these kinda things, but like the average American, like they, they don't have any of these things. And they're just, people are preying on them. Let them prey on you and I. Uh, you know, we're the ones that we have, we're the ones who might like, we should be the ones preyed on, not like the average American.

• 35:49Speaker 00

  When you, you know, grew up in Pakistan and, uh, like I did outside the US, your entire impression of America through Hollywood is like everyone in America is rich, right? Like that's, that's if you, if you ask like.

• 36:06Auren Hoffman?

  Somewhat true in a weird way, right? I mean, the, the average American is very, very, very wealthy compared to the rest of the world.

• 36:12Speaker 00

  Correct. However, you know, if you, now having lived in the US for 30 years, there are millions of Americans, right? That, um, want access to better financial products. And, you know, they wanna exit, you know, in your particular case, they wanna access to better legal products, right? Whether or not that's, you know, One Pay place to do that or not, you know, topic for another day. But the point is that how do we, you know, are back to kind of our mission and what we're focused on as it relates to investing, as it relates to building your credit, as it relates to, you know, even a wireless plan that we've launched in our app, as it relates to products for your car. Ultimately, you wanna, you know, buy a home and get a mortgage, right?

• 36:56Speaker 00

  How can we continue to help customers with better products? And it's all about, you know, fighting inertia and building trust at the same time with, with great value. And if we can get that equation right, then, you know, we'll have a chance of going from eight million customers to, you know, tens of millions.

• 37:14Auren Hoffman?

  What have you learned from working with the Walmart team?

• 37:16Speaker 00

  They are a phenomenal, mission-driven organization. You know? The customer is really, really, really at the center of everything Walmart does. You know, they have a philosophy of everyday low price. Uh, and how do we continue to serve customers with, you know, great, um, products? And everyday low price, the customer at the center of everything they do is not just, you know, for so many companies, like, you know, mission is something you write on a piece of, of, of a wall. No, like that is, they wake up every, everybody at Walmart, um, that I've interacted with,

• 38:00Speaker 00

  you know, to the senior most people of the organization who serve on our board. Obviously they're, you know, they're, they've backed us. We're an independent company, where Walmart's a majority owner. But, you know, from everybody on my board to their product and tech teams to, you know, the hourly associate in the store, like serving customers is, it's, it's, it's really remarkable. And I've learned a ton in terms of, you know, creating that mission-driven ethos.

• 38:25Auren Hoffman?

  Secretly, maybe not so secretly, cause I'm gonna tell you now, um, but I love shopping at Walmart, like in the store. It is so fun. It's like great for discovery. Uh, I, I, it's like, it bring, it brings me great joy.

• 38:40Speaker 00

  I love shopping in a Walmart store as well. Lived in New York City for a long time and there wasn't one close by, but my parents live in, um, upstate New York. And my Walmart in-store story is that, um, my mom was a small business owner and she actually owned four Subway franchises, Subway, the sandwich store, Subway franchises, one of which that happened to be inside of a Walmart. And so I spent, I spent a lot of time in lots of Walmarts, but in that one in particular, a lot of time, both shopping at Walmart and then also working the Subway sandwich line.

• 39:16Auren Hoffman?

  What'd you learn from working the Subway sandwich line?

• 39:18Speaker 00

  You know, the food business is very hard. Uh, yeah, yeah. Uh, the food business, um, is, uh, is incredibly hard, but, um, you know, Subway was really a pioneer in terms of this assembly line, you know, concept that obviously then, you know, the likes of Chipotle and others have, uh, have, uh, have pioneered. But, you know, running a, running a small business is, is, is hard. Um, and the food business in particular is, is very hard, but some great, great memories.

• 39:47Auren Hoffman?

  When I was a kid, I used to go to Subway at least twice a week. And at least at the time, I don't know, I haven't been there in a little bit, but this is a time you like, the foot long was like, it, I don't, maybe it was like, maybe. Thirty or fifty percent more than the than the six inch. So I'd always get the foot longer than I would have like, I would have like lunch and dinner like in one. And it was like, oh, it was like such a good deal.

• 40:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, there was that, there was that campaign that ran forever. It was like the five dollar foot long.

• 40:16Auren Hoffman?

  Oh, okay.

• 40:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, it was like a really, really big campaign.

• 40:20Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah, and you get, and you get, you load it up like people and, you know, whenever they go through, they're like, what do you want? I'm like, I want everything like I want it loaded up so I could get a better meal for myself. But like to keep me full for this is my substance for the next few days.

• 40:34Speaker 00

  Ten fifteen years ago, the five dollar foot long was a, was a big, big marketing campaign.

• 40:40Auren Hoffman?

  Now, when you think of agents, okay, and obviously there's all these agents out there. There's like, I don't know, fifty that were probably launched today. There's Muse, there's Crocbot, there's obviously you have Penny. What, what are, what are these things that agents can't yet do that you're excited for agents to do?

• 40:56Speaker 00

  Again, I would draw a little bit of a distinction between, you know, Benny, which is, you know, our financial agent and the likes of Muse that are trying to be your instinct or others that are trying to do, that are trying to do everything. The area, Orin, that we've been very focused on is, I was actually at, you know, a real, a true story. I was at my daughter's soccer game this weekend, this past weekend. I happened to be chatting with a mom on the sidelines and she was talking about using Muse to help plan travel for her family.

• 41:26Auren Hoffman?

  Yep.

• 41:26Speaker 00

  And did a lot of research, did some great research in terms of, you know, surfing any number of websites and others and coming back with a recommended plan. So I said, okay, great, then did you give it your credit card and actually make the booking? And she's like, no, I wasn't gonna give Muse my credit card.

• 41:41Auren Hoffman?

  She just didn't trust it or something like that, like my, my Muse has my credit card. I don't, I don't know if I should be saying that here because maybe people are gonna hack it or something, but.

• 41:49Speaker 00

  There are definitely people like you and I that are comfortable doing it. But I think the vast, vast, vast majority of, you know, we're the early adopters, like we like.

• 41:58Auren Hoffman?

  Can you, like on one pay, can you give, can you create like a separate credit card for your Muse? That has, okay, it can't be, can't spend more than X dollars or something or?

• 42:08Speaker 00

  That's exactly where I'm headed, which is I think if you think about hundreds of millions of Americans, they are still worried about giving financial information or access to your full bank account or to your full credit card to an agent that could hallucinate. By the way, how are returns gonna work? How, what if I want to cancel the trip, right? All these, so what we did is we have created instead of one pay banking, a sub account. And we call it, you know, the bank account for your agent. Now you can have a separate pocket of money, three hundred dollars, two hundred dollars, whatever you want it to be, with limits where now you know that your agent only Muse only has access to that particular account, right?

• 42:51Speaker 00

  As opposed to having access to your full account. So that's, that's where we are investing.

• 42:56Auren Hoffman?

  Right, this is exactly what our businesses do, so, but it's complicated, annoying. And like every consumer should be able to have that.

• 43:04Speaker 00

  It's very similar to the way that we've, I've created a sub account for my team, right? I've created a separate account with limits and other things that, you know, he doesn't have access to my full bank account. And so this works very similarly.

• 43:17Auren Hoffman?

  You spent a long time at Goldman Sachs. Um, one of the things you did was build up a Marcus there. And when I think of Goldman Sachs, I don't think consumer. Um, that's kind of the last thing I think about Goldman Sachs, right? I think about super, super rich people and, you know, investment banking and maybe some trading and, you know, some other stuff. I don't like, how, how did that kind of even come about?

• 43:43Speaker 00

  I spent almost ten years in the private equity group at Goldman. Um, in the last kind of three or four years, I was a growth investor, investing in, you know, growth companies across a range of industries, but, you know, focused a lot on kind of financial services and fintech. This was twenty fourteen, twenty fifteen. And if you remember, Orin, during the financial crisis, Goldman had become a bank holding company overnight. Prior to that, Goldman was just a broker dealer. But we had become a bank holding company coming out of the financial crisis.

• 44:17Auren Hoffman?

  And just because it was, it was, you had to do the regulations and stuff?

• 44:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. Less by choice, more by fiat, you know, Goldman came, Goldman became a bank.

• 44:26Auren Hoffman?

  So it was like a bank, meaning FDIC regulated.

• 44:29Speaker 00

  Exactly, bank holding company regulated by, you know, bank regulators. Uh, uh, New York State Charter Bank is, is the license that, that we got. In twenty fourteen, a group of us, you know, thought about, well, we don't have any legacy consumer banking, uh, operations, customers, products. But we do have this bank legal entity. And so should we think about starting a, you know, a new consumer fintech? Having this bank license without having any legacy products? And kind of that was the start of, um, that was the start of the, the consumer banking business at Goldman.

• 45:12Auren Hoffman?

  In retrospect, like, was it smart to start? Cause I assume that's like a weird culture clash or should you just like bought something? Bought a fintech company or bought, bought a consumer bank or something or?

• 45:24Speaker 00

  So we did actually stand it up by both acquisitions as well as organic.

• 45:29Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah, I know like David Haber's company moved over, right? She had a few of those, yeah, okay.

• 45:33Speaker 00

  We bought David Haber's company and we actually bought a savings business from GE that was, um, that was, uh, that was selling it at the time. Couple of things I'd say about the journey. One, I'm incredibly proud of what we did at Goldman. I mean, to your point, people didn't give us a chance of being able to get it off the ground. Uh, and when I left at twenty twenty, we had, you know, a billion dollars of revenue, over ten million customers across a range of products. Uh, and, uh, you know, by any measure, you know, uh, quite successful. Obviously no business goes in a straight line, but quite successful to get it off the ground. I think two lessons learned, because again, which, you know, have really benefited us and really helped us in this one page journey.

• 46:14Speaker 00

  One, for all the things that you talked about, very hard to innovate inside of a large corporate, particularly when the DNA of the large corporate is very different than the business that you are starting, which is why.

• 46:27Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 46:27Speaker 00

  In one page today, we have the benefit of Walmart as an investor and their distribution. But we are an independent company that is outside of their four walls, which has allowed us to move with, you know, kind of the speed of a startup. The second thing is while Goldman had a phenomenal brand, certainly, uh, you know, uh, and reputation, uh, we did not have millions or hundreds of millions of customers uh, and access to those from a distribution standpoint. And distribution and customer acquisition, when you're starting from zero, is very expensive and hard.

• 47:02Auren Hoffman?

  Uh, this has been awesome. Okay, two questions we ask all of our guests. Uh, first, how are you personally using AI like day to day, like you personally?

• 47:10Speaker 00

  Two things I'll share. One is, um, honestly, about two years ago, Orin, maybe a little over that, uh, I really went back to school, uh, in a way that I had not gone to school in like thirty years. Yeah, uh, and I found one of our best engineers, uh, Brandon, and literally we set up daily thirty minute classes, okay? And it was like, I knew just the power of this technology and where it was gonna go. And by the way, in the two years, you know, the, the pace of change has only multiplied. But I'm so grateful to Brandon to like setting me up with a terminal

• 47:53Speaker 00

  and giving me some of those like incredibly awesome early lessons on vibe coding and how to, how to work with Claude in ways that have just massively paid dividends. The second thing I'd say is it's been awesome to see AI through the eyes of my fourteen year old and my eleven year old. Because they are AI reflexive in a way that like, no offense to you or to me, we just never will be. Like they, it is just, it is second nature to them. The thing that I have spent the most amount of time doing over the course of the last two years is going from, you know, thinking about should I use AI? And almost as an afterthought to like thinking about using AI first.

• 48:37Speaker 00

  And that honestly has been the biggest change in my life. And that's where Brandon, one of our star engineers, and honestly, my kids have, have helped me the most.

• 48:47Auren Hoffman?

  Is there anything you've done in your personal life that's been kind of fun or interesting? Like, I don't know, helping your family or helping?

• 48:52Speaker 00

  I mean, everything from like, you know, planning vacations, right? To deep research projects on things that I've always wanted to learn. Um, to I am not a runner at all, but I'm desperately, you know, brainstorming as to whether or not I should try to before I turn fifty, run the New York City Marathon. I'm gonna, by the way, walk, walk, run it, uh, a little bit. So it has been, it, it's run honestly the full gamut. But can I say one other thing? It's also been like, I like to think alone. I'm not one of those people that thinks in large groups of people. But I've, I've really enjoyed the banter back and forth with, uh, both Claude and GPT

• 49:36Speaker 00

  in terms of, you know, when I'm dealing with a very tricky situation, particularly now that they have a lot of context on me and how I think. So that's been really helpful, a difficult conversation that I need to have with, you know, an employee or, you know, a partner.

• 49:55Auren Hoffman?

  All right, this has been amazing. Great. Last question we ask all of our guests. What conventional wisdom or advice do you think is generally bad advice?

• 50:01Speaker 00

  Experience is overrated. I will always choose hunger and grit over experience. I think people way over index on experience, particularly in the age of AI. I would actually argue that experience is a negative as opposed to a positive. And then the other piece of advice that I find overrated is, you know, talking about work-life balance. I think work-life balance makes it sound like these are two diametrically opposite things that we need to somehow find equilibrium on. I think work is part of life and life is part of work. And I try to like, you know, just have a much more symbiotic relationship between both of these.

• 50:43Auren Hoffman?

  On the first one, okay, so like, obviously, if you're interviewing someone, it's very easy to determine their experience. You know, maybe you have to like dive in a bit or something or really, did you, what did you really do when you worked at an engineer at Google or whatever? But it's like, it's pretty easy to look at someone's LinkedIn profile and have a sense of their experience. It's very hard to know their grit, the determination, their drive. Like, how does one assess that in, you know, the limited time that you have with them during like an interview? Or even, even pre-interview, like from like a resume or something?

• 51:16Speaker 00

  So, Orin, I think it actually, it comes across pretty quickly. And by the way, there are false positives, so don't get me wrong, right? We'll, we'll, we'll make hiring mistakes and, and, and by the way, the mistakes are on both sides, right? The employee also may not be, this might not be the best fit for them, just like we may not be the best fit. But I actually think it's relatively easy to tell pretty quickly if somebody has the grit and the hunger. If you come to our office in New York, uh, next time you're in New York, we'd love to host you. Like, there's a giant rabbit in our office, right? And the reason we have this giant rabbit is, you know, you've heard the wolf and the rabbit story. It's like our cultural like mascot. The wolf goes home, the rabbit gets away, the family says, why did you let the rabbit get away?

• 52:01Speaker 00

  It says, I was running for my dinner, the rabbit was running for its life. Everybody one day is running for its life. We are not the first. We have to out-execute competition every single day. And like, so my view is like, it's actually relatively easy to tell if somebody is just, you know, there's a, there's a guy that we hired, okay? Who sent us like, you know, 10 different LinkedIn requests to different people on the team. At the 10th one, somebody said, you know what? Fine, just show up. And this happened to be a Sunday night and this person lives like a 10-hour train ride away.

• 52:45Speaker 00

  By the way, the next day was like, I forget which one, but it was like a public holiday. It was one of those where I wasn't sure whether we were open or not.

• 52:51Auren Hoffman?

  Oh, Columbus Day or something or whatever.

• 52:54Speaker 00

  Like, Veterans Day or Columbus Day, whatever. And he basically took a train at 9:00 PM, got on a train, Sunday night, when he got in the LinkedIn response. And 9:00 AM was in our office. By the way, didn't have a place to stay, had just shown up, hadn't showered and was like, you know what? I don't want to miss this opportunity.

• 53:11Auren Hoffman?

  You have to hire this guy. Like, this guy is a total stud, right? Like, unbelievable. Yeah.

• 53:15Speaker 00

  So, experience overrated.

• 53:17Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah, okay, I agree. Okay, if someone does that, like, absolutely, like, I'm hiring you too. Like, that's, that's great. All right, this has been incredible. Thank you, Orin, for joining us on Summation. This has been like, super interesting. I knew, I knew it would be because I just, I know you're kind of on the forefront of stuff, but I'm really happy to have you. Thank you again for, for joining us.

• 53:37Speaker 00

  It's great to, great to be with you, Orin, and let's, let's hang out next time in New York, okay?

• 53:41Auren Hoffman?

  One more thing before we go. I read a blog called Summation. It's the same as this podcast. The blog is about non-obvious idea sharing on business, talent, data, longevity, and random contrarian takes. If you like the conversations on this show, you'll probably like the blog. It's free. New content comes out twice a month. You could subscribe at orin.substack.com. That's orin.substack.com.