Zeta presents an alternative to the joint account

FACTS

• is the name of a new American FinTech that has chosen to differentiate itself by offering a service designed to meet the financial needs of couples who have chosen to manage their finances together without going through a traditional joint account offer.

• Zeta presents its offer as a shared account, designed to meet the needs of modern families. It is thus built on a scalable mode, being able to easily add or remove users, depending on relationships, throughout the life of its customers.

• FinTech plans to provide financial services backed by existing bank accounts. It facilitates the sharing of these accounts, without fully opening the rights to the spouse or partner of the original account holder.

• Couples are invited to download Zeta and then receive a joint card attached to a Zeta account.

• This Zeta account then allows its users to:
  • share recurring bills or expenses (e.g., rent or credit)
  • to feed savings for a common project

• Zeta accounts can be freely topped up from conventional current accounts.

• Zeta's business model is based on the collection of interchange fees related to the use of its cards.

• Zeta's banking partner is Lending Club Bank.

CHALLENGES

• Relying on in-depth knowledge of the needs to reintroduce flexibility in the management of common finances: Zeta's co-founder, Aditi Shekar, spent three years analyzing couples' financial practices, joint monitoring of finances, and sharing of payments and bills. Zeta was developed based on these observations and is said to have already attracted tens of thousands of couples testing a free version of the budget management application.

• Financing its launch: Zeta has just successfully raised $1.5 million in a round of financing that involved investors such as Deciens Capital and Precursor, with the participation of executives from Chime, Square, PayPal, Venmo, Google, Facebook and Weight Watchers.

• A Touch of Inclusive Engagement: Zeta's co-founder says that 57% of his investments have been made with women and people of color.

MARKET PERSPECTIVE

• Beyond the theme of shared accounts, often intended for professionals or families, the joint account represents a fundamental subject for the innovations of several FinTech.

• In the United States, Simple launched a joint account, called Simple Shared, in 2016. More recently, we can cite the example of Bunq+1 in Europe or SharePay, which has since been acquired by Linxo.