A former Googler just launched www.nickel.co, which is an app for kids to manage their allowance.  Their backing bank is Sutton Bank.<p>My guess is one of the partners that they were referring to is CorePro (<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;corepro.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;corepro.io&#x2F;</a>) which was spun out of SmartyPig (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.smartypig.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.smartypig.com&#x2F;</a>).  Their backing bank was Lincoln Savings Bank.<p>One of the consumers of CorePro was Qapital (qapital.com).  It seemed like recently, they switched models from Lincoln Savings Bank&#x27;s individual account to Wells Fargo&#x27;s custodial account.<p>In any case, if you&#x27;re doing anything in consumer FinTech, the technology&#x2F;product is the easy part.  Banking partnership, customer acquisition, and unit economics is the hard part.  Focus on solving the hard part first before building the technology.<p>Edit:<p>One thing that they could have done for an MVP is a bring-your-own-bank-account model.<p>1) Parents would open a bank account for their kids (or the kid may already have their own bank account)<p>2) Integrate with Plaid Connect to get ACH info.<p>3) Use Dwolla ACH API (free) to transfer funds between parent&#x27;s bank account to kid&#x27;s bank account.  (The downside of this is that this is a 2 legged ACH transfer which may take up to a week -- but for this use case, it shouldn&#x27;t be a problem.)<p>This will get them the same value proposition that they would have had with bank integration.  Once they prove out the demand, they can then optimize:<p>1) [Reduce ACH lag] Use an actual ACH processor that will handle the transfer between accounts.  The downside is that this is expensive.<p>2) [Reduce ACH cost) Use a real bank (Wells Fargo, Chase, Citi) as an ACH processor -- this cuts out the lag in transfers.  The catch to this is that to work with these banks, they want to see sufficient activity<p>3) [Eliminate need to bring your own bank] Partner with existing bank to provide account opening service.  If you can prove sufficient activity and traction, many regional banks are interested in a lower cost customer acquisition channel and innovative products.  Alternatively, use custodial accounts and they can earn float on the deposits.<p>What they were trying to do is jump to #3 before proving out the demand.  Secondly, banks are approached all the time by startups to do these types of &quot;partnerships&quot;.  To banks, unless you can show traction or sufficient volume, it&#x27;s not worth their time to work with you.  The large banks (WF, Chase, etc) don&#x27;t see much business from this area.  The small banks don&#x27;t have the resources or risk tolerance to do this.  So you need to find the sweet spot of banks to establish these relationships.  There are a number of regional banks that are willing to work with startups (tip: scout the ToS of these fintech startups to see who they have partnership with)<p>I&#x27;m not sure what their monetization strategy was going to be, but the unit economics here don&#x27;t really work out for low deposit amounts.<p>(I&#x27;ve spent a lot of time research this area in FinTech)