Amazon, Google alumnus plans to hire 100 for new, Latino-focused digital bank
As large as America’s Latino and Hispanic community now stands, many of its banking needs are going unmet.
At least, that’s what veteran technologist Charles Yim believes. An alumnus of both Amazon Web Services and Google and a seasoned venture capitalist, Yim’s four years building out a tech team in Brazil led him to believe that this population requires a unique set of financial services.
So Yim is now founding fortú, which he says will be among the first financial services firms to offer modern banking products “with a Latino cultural context.”
And he is launching it from Miami, where he has lived for the past year.
“As the highest profile American city with a Latino majority and home to the most exciting emerging technology hub, Miami is clearly the best place to build a digital bank serving Latinos,” Yim said in a statement. “We’re proud to call Miami home.”
While the pandemic has helped usher in a new era of tech and finance to the city, Yim’s plans actually predate the onset of COVID. He has already hired 15 employees, about half of whom are local; Yim said he plans to have between 50 and 100 employees based in Miami by the end of 2022.
Yim said that compared with average banking customers, Latino and Hispanic ones are more likely to have multigenerational — and multilingual — living arrangements, with mixed residency and nationality statuses. And they are more likely to have shared finances, along with cross-border financial ties.
As a result, different members of the same household might use different banks and financial institutions. While that may work in certain contexts, in most cases it leads to inefficiencies and unmet needs — ones that Yim says the fortú platform will address.
“Only the largest [banks]...or the most committed smaller community banks, will undertake the extra work and operational complexity to be fully bilingual,” Yim said.
In addition to offering 100% of its services in English and Spanish, fortú will also offer banking products that do not need a Social Security number — which is not an official requirement for opening a U.S. checking account. And Fortú is integrating with Wise, formerly known as TransferWise, to allow customers to send money to more than 50 countries straight from its app. Wise is known for offering currency and remittance services at lower rates than traditional banks.
Fortú has already raised $5 million from New York-based investment group Valar Ventures.
“The Latino digital banking opportunity has been hiding in plain sight for years now,” Valar founding partner James Fitzgerald said in a statement. “There is an abundance of government, academic, and industry data proving unmet demand for financial services by Latinos. We are proud to support fortú in solving the problem of Latino banking disparity in the U.S.”
This story was originally published May 17, 2021 at 4:20 PM.
