Bant Breen:
Aaron is the Chief Strategy Officer of Mission Lane. You’ve disrupted the car industry and you’ve helped to build car lots over the last decade. Now you’re on another mission called Mission lane. So tell us a little bit about what the goal is there.
Aaron Montgomery:
I’ll tell you the story there and I gave a bit of an Easter egg in the intro, but that person who called me and said, “I want you to meet this guy as my a good friend of mine,” Shane Holdaway, and he’s the CEO of Mission Lane. We sat next to each other in business school, and he called me a year back. He said, “I heard that you stepped down as CEO of car lots,” and I was still on the board at the time, he said, “Are you able to take on another challenge? We’ll tell you more about it.” Since I’ve just started working with this FinTech time, they’re working out of San Francisco and Richmond. He said, “I think it’s right up your alley, what we’re trying to do is create a financial services superstore for the underbanked.” I said, “Well, that sounds awesome. Why do you think that’s right up my alley, I just started, I was selling cars a couple of months ago,” “I know how much you care about closing gaps. I know how much you care about disruption, and I think this will be right for you. Come hear me out. Let’s talk about this.” And as we talked about it, he was absolutely right. I’ve always known him to be a thoughtful person, I knew that he had thought through every angle and what role I could play in the company. What this company was set up to do and again, it started as a credit card issuer with the goal of creating providing clear and transparent credit terms for people who had traditionally been left behind by traditional credit issuers. To expand beyond that, and create the other products that can help to wrap that community up and give them a chance actually to improve their financial lives and not just do it from a buzzword, a mission statement place but like to have a real financial impact. That was the big focus area for me at the time was that given the good fortune that I had, and the things that I’ve learned along the way, the car lights experience had taught me that however high you aim, if you just suspend your disbelief, anything could happen like what would you aim to solve it? This is that kind of gnarly problem that with the growing wealth and financial inequity problems that we have, I can have some hand in resolving some of the challenges,
Bant Breen:
How is mission lane tackling these things? You said you’re working on expanding that core set of services. What areas are you guys moving into?
Aaron Montgomery:
I think when your brand is broad, look at the top 10 things that people need to have a healthy financial life. You think about the jobs that your money that you need your money to do, you need access to credit, you need to be able to store and move money or transfer money, maybe overseas or something like that. You need to be able to build savings and grow them when you may need money to pay for housing or to get a car for transportation more broadly. When you look at that suite of offerings that you’ll need, that’s the job. How would you best serve? Whether building buying partnering with other products, how do we fill those needs to serve our core base? That’s what’s exciting about it because, as you mentioned, there’s so much momentum to think about these things in different ways than we ever had before. When I say savings to people now they think about a savings account, a CD, maybe think about retirement savings, or specific use case savings. Now, there are a growing number of fintech that are focused exclusively on emergency savings. We’ll see statistics, like 40% of Americans couldn’t come up with $400 cash in an emergency. There’s no tax advantage to building emergency savings, a safety net for emergency savings. The fact that people are now putting technology and innovation toward these problems, creates a lot of opportunities. To be able to look at that green field and say, “What can we plug and play and build in this space?” That is an exciting challenge.
Bant Breen:
Aaron, thank you so much for being on UNCAGED today and we look forward to having you back.
To see the full interview on the Uncaged YouTube channel, go to:
