How do we not become a bank?

This is the seventh post in our series "From old money to Smart Money." If you haven't read the first six, we recommend you start here.

Now you understand why we don’t want to become a bank: the financial system is broken, and every business built on top of it deals with that by leveraging misaligned business models. They win when their customers lose.

We want your money to work for you. But more than that, we want to build a sustainable, customer-aligned business. And not in the buzzword-y “we’re on your side” sense — but rather, from a deep place of being truly economically aligned with you.

We’ll give you a teaser here of how we do that. But if you’ve made it this far, we can tell you’re a sophisticated reader — and that our explanation here won’t be satisfactory. We’ve got the answers, but it isn’t time to fully share them quite yet. You might be able to read between the lines, though…

When you use Eco, you get rewards points — called Eco Points. Our business model — the whole way our company is set up — is to try to make these Eco Points as useful as possible over time.

Imagine a world where Amex executives got paid in Amex points, or Chase employees in Chase points. What do you think they’d do?

We think they’d obsessively focus on doing the right thing by their customers — they’d try to make those points as useful as possible.

And then imagine if that world expanded: if those companies paid their vendors in points. If they got paid by their customers in points. A world where that company was aligned with everyone they did business with. What would that new economy look like? And what might the flaws be with Amex or Chase doing that, and how could they be solved?

We’ve set ourselves up to avoid those flaws — and to bring about the best version of that future. And yes, we’re building Eco Points using that same easy-and-cheap-to-transfer blockchain technology. That doesn’t change the fact that your deposits in the Eco App remain denominated in dollars, but it does power up the entire system.

We’ll be sharing more about these Eco Points — and how they’ll evolve — soon. And we’ll share how they enable our business model and economically align us with you, making sure we all win together.

But here at Eco, we always say we want to “blow people’s minds one step at a time.” So, given everything we’ve already shared today, we’ll leave it there for now. But what we can say is that another one of our values is “our earliest users win with us...”

We hope you’ll join us.