Building long-term financial trust with Propel

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The Financial Revolutionist: What is Propel?

Jimmy Chen: Propel is a consumer fintech focused on low-income Americans, meaning someone who earns under $40,000 per year and is using a social safety net program. We started off by helping people manage their SNAP and EBT cards. The pain point we found back in 2015 was that people have to call a 1-800 number on the back of their EBT card to check their balance, which is the most commonly called phone number in the United States, because there are 40 million people who have SNAP benefits on EBT cards. 

I asked, why isn't there a mobile banking app for the EBT card? Over the years that's evolved to the point where we really see the EBT and government benefits as primarily an acquisition hook. We serve more than 5 million monthly active users, and folks come to our app now to solve a bunch of other financial problems.

What does that include?

We have a job board to help people find different types of work. We operate a debit card as well that helps people track what their income is and their expenses. We look at major expenses that families have—things like utility bills, groceries, internet and cell phone bills—and have a variety of partnerships focused on helping you save money on those. So that's a platform called the Providers app. We think of it as a way for low-income families to use a comprehensive tool to manage their financial lives, which for them includes government benefits and money. 

What’s informed your product roadmap—going from focusing on EBT to expanding your scope into budgeting and financial concerns writ large?

There are few families who rely on the safety net alone—even if you get food stamps, it’s likely you’re using private-sector financial services like a checking account, credit card, debt, or an insurance product. If we want to be an anti-poverty company, we have to understand the financial situation that our users are in outside of government: not just government benefits, but also their financial lives.

We see our product roadmap as trying to get comprehensive on that list of inputs, so that we can then help you figure out what action steps you want to take, whether it's changing jobs, getting a different Medicaid plan, or signing up for a debit card. If we can build that trusted relationship and foundation with people, we can have the opportunity to influence purchasing decisions for these major life stages, and that’s a way for us to successfully monetize in the best interest of the customer.

What kind of interest did you receive from VCs when you were mainly focused on government services versus a sort of Super App offering?

We started propel back in 2014. Our first funding was from a nonprofit called the Financial Health Network that we got in our second year. We didn't raise our first institutional round until Spring 2017, which was our Seed round that Andreessen Horowitz led. That was a bit of a turning point for us. 

A mistake that I had made as a first-time entrepreneur was not telling a compelling story about why the space we were in was investable. I was telling the compelling story of why we're solving human problems, but I wasn't successfully telling the story of why this was a business opportunity that won't force us to compromise our values. 

In terms of the Super App vision: Did that idea come from investors or elsewhere?

It really came from talking to our users about their financial lives and about the challenges that they face. We've had a customer service email line from the very beginning of the company; as with any other tech company, we get a lot of straightforward troubleshooting emails. But we also get a pretty big chunk of emails where people say, “Hey, I don't have anywhere to sleep tonight. What do I do?” or  “I owe these people a debt and they won't stop calling me.” 

These challenges have pushed us to be more and more ambitious about the things that we can do as a company. There’s an element of trust that we've been able to earn over the years. And as a result we feel some responsibility to try to responsibly broaden our mandate as a company to be able to solve more and more of these problems. A lot of the problems seem rooted in finance—in money, in payments, in financial services—and in the things that financial services can unlock for people. That’s what pushed us in this direction. We realized that your EBT card was this tiny slice of your financial life, and this got us visibility into the whole spectrum of things that people experience every month.

It seems like your reliability and your constancy over the past eight years have been what has permitted you to kind of widen the lens and develop trust with your users.

As much as I would have loved to be an overnight success, I think the reality is that there’s no silver bullet for building trust in this demographic. A lot of low-income families have been burned so many times by predatory lenders or outright scams on the internet: They’re skeptical about postings that they see, and rightfully so. And our recipe for gaining trust has been mostly just consistency. We make a promise, and we fulfill it. We do it day in and day out.