Copper provides banking services specifically designed for teenagers, featuring a Copper Debit Card and a mobile app that offer easy access to funds while promoting financial education. The app allows teens to manage their money without hidden fees, overdraft charges, or minimum balance requirements, making banking straightforward and accessible. Copper differentiates itself from competitors by focusing on the unique needs of young users and their parents, ensuring a safe banking experience with features like zero liability protection from Mastercard and FDIC insured deposits through a partnership with Evolve Bank & Trust. The company aims to prepare the next generation for financial independence by combining practical banking tools with educational resources, fostering a community through a referral program that rewards users for inviting friends.

Arnold Ventures

Financial Venture Studio

Maven Ventures

Jack Brody

Fiat Ventures

Pioneer Square Ventures

Clocktower Technology Ventures

Mana Ventures

Launchpad Capital

Index Ventures

Pioneer Square Labs

Western Technology Investment

Panoramic Ventures

Insight Partners

BIP Ventures

Invesco Private Capital

Fintech

Copper Banking

At this writing, on Tuesday (May 28), the ripple effects of Synapse’s bankruptcy keep rippling. But with each filing, with the reports that customers can’t retrieve their money, that sponsor banks and other FinTechs have walked away from relationships with the funds … and even that other firms are facing existential threat, there’s one theme that’s emerging:. The interconnectedness of it all. At almost every level, the banking-as-a-service (BaaS) model may be sorely tested

Five Things To Watch As Synapse Bankruptcy Impact Shakes Up Fintechs

The recent Synapse bankruptcy represents one of the biggest implosions in the FinTech sector’s history. The ongoing mess at the banking-as-a-service (BaaS) platform has affected over a hundred thousand U.S. end-users, including other FinTech businesses, and investigations into its fallout has brought to light an estimated $85 million shortfall between what Synapse’s depositors are owed and what the failed FinTech’s own accounts show. According to a Thursday (June 13) report by the Chapter 11 trustee, former FDIC Chair and current Cravath, Swaine and Moore partner Jelena McWilliams, “At the time of this Report, the Trustee has been informed by at least one Partner Bank that there exists an approximate shortfall of $65 – $96 million according to reconciliation progress to date.”

Making Sense Of For Benefit Accounts (Fbos) And Fintech’S Future

The impact of Synapse’s bankruptcy continues to spiral outward, extending now to FinTech startup Yotta. For the past three weeks, 85,000 of the company’s customers — holding a total of $112 million in savings — have been locked out of their accounts, CNBC reported Sunday (June 2). The reason? Yotta is caught in the middle of a dispute between two of its banking partners: Synapse and Evolve Bank  Trust. Yotta founder and CEO Adam Moelis told CNBC the dispute has forced his customers to borrow money for food and put major events such as weddings and surgeries into flux

Savings App Yotta Says 85,000 Accounts Caught In Synapse Meltdown

GeekWire co-founders Todd Bishop, left, and John Cook open the 2024 GeekWire Awards at Showbox SoDo in Seattle on Thursday. (GeekWire Photo / Kevin Lisota)After giving a nod to tech’s bygone era of gadgets and gimmicks, we celebrated the new entrepreneurs shaping the future of innovation in Seattle and the Pacific Northwest on Thursday night at the GeekWire Awards.The annual event, now in its 15th year, brought a sold-out crowd to Showbox SoDo in Seattle, where more than 60 finalists across a dozen categories competed for awards ranging from Startup of the Year to Next Tech Titan to Workplace of the Year, and more.Much like it has been for the past year, artificial intelligence was a recurring buzzword running through the evening, as evidenced by the number of finalists and winners seizing on the technology.“It’s an exciting moment and a transformational time in all our lifetimes because of the way generative AI has taken the industry by storm,” said Deal of the Year winner Madhan Subhas, co-founder of Seattle-area startup Rhythms.Rob McPherson sings his song about bygone tech onstage at the GeekWire Awards in Seattle on Thursday. (GeekWire Photo / Kevin Lisota)But long before AI, the innovation of yesteryear was just as celebrated and equally instrumental in getting us where we are today. The “Land Before Tech” theme of the night had a prehistoric feel with dinosaurs and table centerpieces made of outdated VHS tapes, Polaroid cameras and more. It was all punctuated by a performance by Robert “The Drunken Tenor” McPherson. With lyrics set to Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” performing in front of a rapid-fire video montage, McPherson touched on seemingly every gadget or gizmo that ever seemed cutting edge to the majority of the people in the room.We threw it in a fire

Geekwire Awards 2024 Revealed: Winners Bask In Momentum Of Ai And Potential Of Region

(Copper Image). A small subset of customers storing money with fintech startup Copper are not able to access their deposit accounts due to a disruption with embattled banking-as-a-service platform Synapse. Copper is one of several companies affected by an ongoing fiasco at Synapse, which filed for bankruptcy last month. The company, which acts as a “middleware provider” between fintech startups and banks, was set to be acquired by TabaPay but TechCrunch reported that the deal fell through earlier this month.Customers of Yotta Technologies and Juno Finance are also locked out of deposit accounts, Forbes reported Tuesday.Copper launched four years ago with a banking platform targeted at teens and families. The company raised $29 million in 2022; at the time it had more than 800,000 users and was a finalist for Startup of the Year at the GeekWire Awards.Copper CEO Eddie Behringer told GeekWire on Tuesday that the company was preparing to pivot away from banking services to focus on its newer “Earn” product that helps users make money from surveys and games.But the plan accelerated earlier this month. In a message to customers on May 12, Behringer said the company would discontinue the debit card and deposit account offerings within 24 hours.A week prior, “we learned that the banking middleware provider we utilize is sunsetting their service imminently,” Behringer wrote

Fintech Startup Copper Forced To Discontinue Banking Services Amid Synapse Fiasco

Another fintech startup, and its customers, has been gravely impacted by the implosion of banking-as-a-service startup Synapse.Copper Banking, a digital banking service aimed at teens, notified its customers on May 12 that it would be discontinuing bank deposit accounts and debit cards on May 13. In a letter to customers, CEO and co-founder Eddie Behringer said the company had learned the previous week that the banking middleware provider they used, Synapse, was sunsetting its service “imminently.” “Despite our prior planning, this event has forced us to close banking accounts much sooner than expected,” he wrote.Synapse filed for Chapter 11 reorganization bankruptcy on April 22 with plans to sell its assets to TabaPay for $9.7 million. But that sale fell through and last week a United States Trustee filed an emergency motion asking the judge to convert to a Chapter 7 liquidation bankruptcy.The discontinuation of Copper Banking’s bank accounts and debit cards means that some Copper customers do not have access to their funds. Behringer says that it is working with its banking partners, AMG National Trust Bank and Synapse, to return their money to them as soon as possible. Behringer said that as soon as it heard the news that the TabaPay deal was in jeopardy it began returning customer funds, so only a small, single-digit number of its customers did not receive their funds before the service was shut down. Copper now has plans to offer a white-labeled family banking product later this year in partnership with “large banks across America,” which Behringer told TechCrunch in an interview he could not yet name. The company had been planning to move in that direction over the past year, he added, but the process was accelerated due to Synapse’s demise

Teen Fintech Copper Had To Emergency Discontinue Its Banking, Debit Products

Ophir Ronen, founder and CEO of CalmWave, accepts the award for UX Design of the Year at the 2023 GeekWire Awards. (GeekWire File Photo / Kevin Lisota)The finalists for UX Design of the Year at the 2024 GeekWire Awards are helping end users across home building, investing, AI-generated speech, data analysis, and schedule and expense tracking for gig workers. The award is intended to recognize a product that has a user experience that is meaningful, usable and delightful for those end-users. The five finalists are Digs, Copper, Row Zero, WellSaid Labs, and Solo.Keep scrolling for descriptions of each finalist, provided through the nomination process. And submit your vote here or below for UX Design of the Year, presented by Blink UX.Digs End user: Residential home builders, vendors, and homeowners.Describe how the UX benefits an end user: The UX of Digs takes the complicated process of collaboration on a home build and makes it intuitive and simple to use with familiar UX similar to many favorite social media and collaboration platforms. Add in automatic organization and AI-powered search and the user has a powerful yet easy-to-use experience that enhances the build process for everyone involved.CopperEnd user: Kids, teens, and parents.Describe how the UX benefits an end user: Starting from obtaining SEC approval for teens to be able to build an investment portfolio that is focused on driving financial knowledge through investing real money in the stock market, the team has distilled a tremendous amount of complexity into a user experience that has driven over 2.6 million members to start their journey in wealth building

Vote For Ux Design Of The Year: Finalists Help Users Across Investing, Data Analysis And More

Coverage of the GeekWire Awards , presented by Astound Business Solutions , the Pacific Northwest’s annual startup and technology awards. Vote here !The finalists for Deal of the Year at the 2023 GeekWire Awards all struck big transactions to help fuel their companies focused on cancer therapies, gaming, clean energy, data analytics, and money management.The finalists in the category are Affini-T Therapeutics, Bungie, Copper, First Mode and MotherDuck.This category recognizes an acquisition, IPO or financing round that occurred between April 2022 and April 2023.Last year’s winner was Seattle fintech company Remitly, which lets people send and receive money across borders and went public in 2021.The GeekWire Awards recognize the top innovators and companies in Pacific Northwest technology. Finalists in this category and others were selected based on community nominations, along with input from GeekWire Awards judges. Community voting across all categories will continue until May 1, combined with feedback from judges to determine the winner in each category.We'll announce the winners on May 18 at the GeekWire Awards, presented by Astound Business Solutions. There are a limited number of table sponsorships available to attend the event. Contact our events team at events@geekwire.com for more information.Submit your votes here or below and keep scrolling for descriptions of each finalist for Deal of the Year, presented by Wilson Sonsini.Create your own user feedback surveyAffini-T Therapeutics launches with $175MFrom left: Affini-T scientific co-founders and Fred Hutch investigators Philip Greenberg, Aude Chapuis, and Thomas Schmitt

Vote For Deal Of The Year: Affini-T Therapeutics, Bungie, Copper, First Mode, Motherduck

A chain is only as strong as its weakest link, as the saying goes. And as the fallout from Synapse’s chaotic bankruptcy continues, containing the impact of its collapse across the financial services and FinTech supply chain ecosystem is top of mind for both the over 100 affected firms and industry observers alike.That’s because the implosion of Synapse, a middleware firm whose services allowed other businesses to embed banking services into their own offerings, has rattled the prospects of many other startups, while at the same time underscoring just how interdependent the FinTech world is — and how vulnerable it can be to a single point of failure.Fundamentally, the Synapse story is a B2B story, one with commercial relationships at its center.Synapse’s troubles potentially began — or were brought to light — when Synapse’s largest client, Mercury, decided to work directly with Evolve, Synapse’s core banking partner, cutting out the need for Synapse as an intermediary.That set off a chain of events, few of them good, for Synapse’s other clients who relied on the FinTech provider as their connective tissue.And it highlighted the fact that effective management of third-party risks, as well as the mitigation of single points of failure, is perennially essential for B2B success — no matter the industry a business is operating within.Read more: Five Things to Watch as Synapse Bankruptcy Impact Shakes Up FinTechsSynapse Customers Struggle to Navigate Fallout From CollapseMany FinTechs relied on Synapse as a foundational partner to jumpstart their own growth, and Synapse’s collapse has underscored the cascading effects of what can happen when a core partner of a business’s own core partner moves their business elsewhere.Along with Mercury, FinTech companies Relay, Cleo, Dave, Yotta and Stilt are all among Synapse clients that have since moved on to other Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) providers or decided to shift their own product offerings.Neobank Juno Finance, which provides on-ramp services to the cryptocurrency ecosystem, has been unable to find a new partner post-Synapse’s collapse because its relationship with the crypto sector has kept other banks at bay, per a company blog post.“This has been incredibly difficult and frustrating for us as well and the entire team who has been caught in the crosshair … between Synapse and Evolve Bank & Trust,” said Juno in the same statement, noting that the company has been provided with “very limited visibility and information.”Teen-focused banking app Copper, for example, has decided not to find another provider and is instead pivoting to sell its platform as a solution to other banks, while crowd-funding investment marketplace Mainvest is shutting down its business entirely by June 14 due to Synapse’s bankruptcy.“External factors have led us to the difficult decision to cease Mainvest’s operations and dissolve the company,” the company wrote.And as many as 100 other companies have found themselves struggling to navigate Synapse’s bankruptcy and collapsed relationship with Evolve. Because Synapse’s architecture was unregulated, it is unlikely that federal officials will step in to help as they did when Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) collapsed last year, leaving any resolution up to a potential settlement or court order, neither of which have happened yet.Still, it’s not all bad news. After moving on from Synapse, business banking platform Relay announced Wednesday (May 29) it had raised $32.2 million Series B round.PYMNTS has reached out to both Synapse and Evolve for further comment.Read more: Managing Third-Party Risks Emerges as Key B2B IssueWhen the Middle Falls out of MiddlewarePYMNTS Intelligence found this past summer that 65% of banks and credit unions have entered into at least one FinTech partnership in the past three years, with 76% of banks viewing FinTech partnerships as necessary to meeting customer expectations. And a full 95% of banks are focused on using partnerships to enhance their own digital product offerings.“With complex ecosystems, you have a higher number of partners than you may have historically had” in the past, Larson McNeil, co-head of marketplaces and digital ecosystems at J.P. Morgan Payments, told PYMNTS

Synapse’S Downfall Provides Case Study In B2B Partner Management

They say there are no guarantees in life. That sentiment applies to financial services — at least, depending on where you look, or what promises are made by nonbanks. With traditional financial institutions (FIs), such as the banks that have been around for decades, even centuries, there are some guarantees. Up to $250,000

Copper Banking

Banking services tailored for teenagers

Copper Banking

Banking services tailored for teenagers

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