The Current Wave: Merchants, markets and awards

We’re excited to announce the launch of our newsletter, The Current Wave, where we’ll be sharing everything from all that’s new at Current to industry insights from Current CEO Stuart Sopp, to discussing impacts on the economy and global markets.

What’s Current-ly happening with us?

Burger King and Forever 21 joined our list of national merchants where our members can now earn points and redeem them for cash back. Points are now available at over 90 percent of all Burger Kings nationwide with 2x points available and 5x points available on purchases at Forever 21. In just the first week of offering points, we saw a 5x growth in spend at Burger King vs. the previous weekly average.

Back in July, we became the first fintech to launch points rewards based on debit, allowing our members to earn cash back just for making their everyday purchases at both national retailers and local stores, with other national retailers including Subway, Rite-Aid, True Value and Cold Stone Creamery amongst our over 14,000 merchants.

We also recently launched cash deposits at Current, which was a highly requested feature from our over 1.4 million members, and in just over three weeks since the feature launch, our members have already deposited over $2 million. We have now also added both Walgreens® and Duane® to the national retail locations where our members can deposit cash through our partnership with InComm.

Listening to your customers and building products to solve their problems is the name of the game and we’re proud to do that at Current. Next look for even more offers and updates to our points system.

We’re honored to be Fino-vaters

Current has been awarded the 2020 Excellence in Financial Inclusion Award from Finovate. Our mission to improve financial outcomes for people and their unique lives guides everything we do as we’re extremely honored to have won this award just for doing our jobs and getting our members their money as quickly as possible, especially at a time many needed it most this year.

We were the first fintech in the country to credit government stimulus checks back in April, which was five days earlier than traditional banks, using our own balance sheet to make all funds fully available for our members right away. We’re also proud we were able to quickly pivot and build a dedicated section of the Current app to help our members be informed of how to receive their stimulus payments and then pivot again to build a dedicated section in our app to help our members filing for unemployment, with links to each individual state’s department of labor. We’re very proud to deliver on the promises we have made to our members and will continue to do so every day at Current.

Digital financial conferences are back and featuring Current!

The pandemic put an indefinite hold on all in-person financial conferences around the world in the spring, but thanks to a lot of hard work for many organizers, they’re back in a digital way.

Be sure to catch the inaugural Challengers’ Conference tomorrow with Tearsheet. Stuart will be doing a fireside chat with Tearsheet founder Zack Miller on September 22, specifically around banking customers who have been overlooked and underserved by traditional banks. You can sign up here.

At Finovate Fall last week Stuart spoke on a panel on Friday, September 18 on ‘Best practice in customer acquisition, engagement and retention: Neobanks going the extra mile’ with host Ian Benton and fellow panelists Timothy Chiodo from Credit Suisse, Tyler McIntyre of Novo and Wesley Wright of Varo.

Here’s what passing of Ruth Bader Ginsburg may mean for economic stimulus:

A whopping 8% of the workforce is still unemployed and we’ve actually seen the numbers go UP, not down at Current. For August, 18.7% of Current’s over 1.4 million members were receiving unemployment benefits, up from 17.4% in July. Point of comparison, pre-pandemic in March, less than 1 percent of all members were receiving unemployment. There was 585% growth in members on unemployment from March to April. With the death of Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stuart thinks that Congress may now shift its attention to a confirmation battle, and away from working on a new stimulus package, and equity markets will roll over as a result.

What’s happening in the international markets?

We’re also watching the international landscape for warning signs that there is a second wave of the coronavirus, which could be one of the biggest factors in the market right now. There are secondary waves in the UK, France and Spain and in America, and that could be an indicator of what’s to come here and a similar dynamic, with far-reaching economic consequences as a result.

That’s it for this week! We’ll be back periodically with the latest on the Current Wave.