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The Future of Mobile Banking: TechBullion Interview with the CEO of Marygold & Co.

Marygold & Co. is an all-in-one banking app that acts as a private banker on your phone – a payment services and personalized banking app offering FREE FDIC-insured accounts and a Mastercard® debit card to anyone in the United States, providing a secure way to send, receive, spend and save with no banking fees or minimum requirements through a customizable mobile banking and financial services app built to organize financial lives. In this interview with TechBullion, the CEO talks about the future of mobile banking.

Please tell us more about yourself?

Nicholas Gerber, CEO The Marygold Companies and Marygold & Co.  The Marygold Companies are a NYSE American public listed holding company.  Our largest subsidiary is a $4.5 billion ETF money manager and our newest is Marygold & Co, our app led debit card fintech. 

What is  Marygold & Co and what unique solutions do you provide?

Marygold & Co is a fintech debit card and app which combines payments, savings and investing all in one curated high-tech, high-touch place.

Tell us more about the mobile banking industry, how big is this industry and what is the current global market size?

These days mobile banking is banking.  Financial services like banking, brokerage, insurance, mortgages represent 10% of American economy.  It is one of the largest and oldest industries there is.

 Walter Wriston, ex-CEO Citibank once said you don’t need a bank, but you do need banking. Money is a huge and growing global market.

 How does a private banker on your phone work and what are the benefits, could you give us a walkthrough of the Marygold & Co all-in-one banking app?

 Our #2 employee, Nicole, title is head of client satisfaction.  This was two years before we had any clients! Now while that shows we care about the experience our clients get, calling the people who enjoy Marygold & Co clients instead of users or customers also shows it. 

 We benchmark clients experience with the best service available from any business.  From not timing phone centers calls like Zappos, to making sure the app look and feel is clean and easy to understand like Apple, or being consistent from one interaction to the next like a McDonald’s. 

 Bringing high tech and high touch is what we mean by white gloves private banker experience.  Something, until today, you had to have $5 million in assets or more to afford.

Where there is money, there are always security concerns, what are the security issues facing mobile banking?

We take the security of our clients private data seriously.  From military-grade cryptographic encryption of all private individual information on the world’s best cloud providers like AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google. To giving granular control in the app to our clients about not just freezing a card on or off but turning swipe on or off, heck, our clients can turn the internet on or off at the click of a switch.  They can continue to use the card as they want but no one can perform a card not present transaction.

The biggest concern all financial firms have is simple fraud.  For example, getting a call from someone saying your bank account has been compromised and in order to restore it, you have to give that person your password.  Don’t do it!

 Reputable firms don’t ask for passwords.  We already know it, why should we have to ask!?

 As financial firms transition towards a digital future, how crucial is it to merge payments with banking solutions?

We have one life, one primary source of income, one way of looking at our wealth.  Because of government regulations, payments, banking, brokerage, insurance, mortgages ect have been broken down into individual uncorrelated silos each with their own businesses offering products and esoteric terminology.

 By combining all these services in one app, we make life easier and simpler.  Finance does not have to be hard. 

Anyone who thinks it should be is selling you FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt).

What other prevalent trends should we look out for in banking and payments and where do you see the future of mobile banking?

Marygold & Co exists to help organize our clients families financial lives.  I would expect future trends to extend our objective.  Helping clients remember passwords, organize important documents like Wills or Medical Directives. And extend sharing or information and permissions so that children and elders can have the extra help they made need. Or so that outside third parties like an accountant can see your account. Or account aggregation so clients can see all their accounts whether with Marygold &  Co or at another bank or brokerage all in one place.  Or…

Are your payment services only available in the United States, do you have plans for global expansion?

Marygold & Co is currently only available in the USA today but we have plans to enter England before year end and then many countries in 2023 and beyond.

 Do you have any available opportunities for investors and partnerships at Marygold & Co?

Marygold & Co is a 100% owned subsidiary of The Marygold Companies, a NYSE American publicity traded holding company.  Our ticker symbol is MGLD.

 Just call your broker or go online to buy or sell our stock any business day.

 Do you have more information to share with our readers today on mobile banking and Marygold & Co?

The best time to have started planting a shade tree is 30 years ago.  The next best time is today.

 If your readers are serious about saving and investing for a goal like retirement, today is a great time to start.

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F.I.R.E. (Financial Independence, Retire Early)

“Compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world. He who understands it, earns it; he who doesn’t, pays it.”

– Albert Einstein

What is F.I.R.E.?

FIRE is a lifestyle movement that grew out of the GFC (the recession of 2007-2009 called the Global Financial Crisis).  Its goal, as the name suggests, is for people to gain their financial independence and retire early.  You can see more about it on Wikipedia.

Some great people who give advice about it and that we follow are:

We know we have missed a lot of quality people and if you would like to be added to the list or have a recommendation, drop Nicole an email.

What is interesting about the movement is how down-to-Earth and full of common sense it is.  It is not a “get rich quick” scam but rather uses time-tested methods for living a good life.  Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett’s longtime partner at Berkshire Hathaway, has said, again and again, that the best way to live a long and happy life is to live beneath your means when young so you don’t have to when you are old.  Ben Franklin broke up a person’s life into three parts; getting an education, being productive, giving back.  Albert Einstein is reputed to have said, “Compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world. He who understands it earns it; he who doesn’t pays it.”

FIRE boils down to:

  • Save a lot
  • Start early
  • Be nice to others ( I added this last one)

Financial Independence Through Saving Money

One of the best ways to save money is to make sure you never see it.  Apps and savings accounts that automatically round up a credit or debit card purchase to the nearest dollar and put the extra money into a saving or investing account are an example of this.  Another good way is to pay a bit extra in money you owe for credit cards or mortgages.  Never pay only the minimum if you can.  Also, make sure to pay off your credit cards before other debts as they usually have the highest interest rates.

Once you have saved some money, invest it, and then don’t look at the balance every day.  If your money is in the stock market and the market takes a 20%+ tumble which it does every few years, you might panic and take your money out at exactly the wrong time.  As the advertising slogan for the lottery says- “You have to be in it to win it”.

Financial Independence Through Investing

Being in the stock market has historically shown to be a winner.  Since 1926, there have only been two periods when keeping your money in the S&P500 with dividends reinvested over ten years would have resulted in a loss and then, it would have only been for about 10% of your money.  Those two periods were during the Great Depression and the GFC.

If your time horizon for the use of money was 20 years, you would have never had a loss of principal.  Of course, past experience is not an indication of future returns which is why professional advice is helpful as is diversification.  But time is your friend when it comes to investing so don’t look at your account statements too often.

A long, long time ago, in a far off place called New England, there was once a traveler who came upon a small village.  He noticed someone locked in the stockade.  “What have they done?” inquired the traveler.

“He dipped into principal.”

 

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The Future of the Stock Market

money pools mobile

Want to know a secret? I know where the stock market will be in 10 years.

– Nicholas Gerber, Founder

The stock market, as measured by a broad index like the S&P500, will be about 55% higher in ten years or about 5,280 up from today’s approximate 3,200. This is down from historical projections of the stock market doubling every ten years or so.

There are two strong proven formulas behind this forecast:

  1. The Bogle Model
  2. The Demographic Model

The Bogle Model

John Bogle (1929-2019) was the founder of The Vanguard Group, one of the first people to create an index fund for retail investors, author, and generally smart & nice guy. In 1991 he wrote an article in the Journal of Portfolio Management called “Investing in the 1990s: Remembrance of things past, and yet to come”. In it, he wrote that only three things mattered in the aggregate when it came to figuring out the long-run returns of the stock market. The stock market’s current yield, the growth of earnings, and the level of price to earnings (PE ratio) at the end compared to the beginning. The S&P500 is currently yielding about 2% a year, earnings are projected to grow slowly at 3% a year and the PE ratio is projected to stay the same at about 22. Historically the PE ratio has averaged about 15 but with interest rates so low, it makes sense to keep PE high or maybe even move it up a bit. So total average long-run growth from today’s levels should be 2% (dividend yield) plus (3% growth of earnings) + 0% (PE ratio change) or 5% a year which comes to about 55% after ten years.

The Demographic Model

Another simple-but-effective model is the Demographic Model. It simply states that stocks are reflections of business and business can only grow if population increases, if productivity increases or if inflation increases. The US Census Bureau estimates that the population will grow by about 1% a year over the next ten years. Productivity has been slow this century and while expected to pick up with the advent of technology being taken advantage of more, a stable conservative number of only 2% a year is warranted. Inflation is low today at about 2% and expected not to grow until the economy can get to full employment again which might take a few years. Once it does, watch out but that is a story for another article. If we add up the components of business growth; 1% population, 2% productivity, and 2% inflation we get 5% a year which again comes to about 55% after ten years.

What to Do?

The best way to take advantage of this knowledge is to invest and forget. Create Money Pools for your savings and investing dollars. Attached goals and end values to the Money Pools like Christmas in 3 years $500, College in 10 years $35,000, or Retirement in 35 years $3,000,000. Once you know how much money you want and when it then becomes simple math to use the formulas above to figure out how much you will need to save today to reach them.

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Origin Story – Marygold & Co.

Where does the name Marygold & Co come from?

Marigold, as you know, is a flower.

Its name originally came from middle English, over 500 years ago, and was a combination of the Virgin Mary and Gold.

Back then people were poor and did not have savings accounts, money pools, or debit cards. They did go to Church and were asked to tithe to help support the local priest. Well, being poor, they did not have much in the way of hard currency or money, but they gave what they could afford which was sometimes only a small bright flower that looked like gold. They would lay these flowers at the foot of Mary’s statue. Hence the name- Mary’s Gold, which over time turned into Marygold and eventually Marigold.

Also, the URL for marigoldandco.com was taken.

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