If you're like most people, you have too many cards in your wallet. Fintech entrepreneurs have tried to tackle this problem from a variety of ways — from new hardware solutions to developing reward programs so good that you wouldn't want to use another card. No one has quite succeeded. In fact with all the challenger banks and metal cards out there, we have more options to weigh down our wallets than ever.
This is exactly the use case and problem Binji tries to solve. It's hard exactly to describe what Binji is. First and foremost, it's an innovative Bluetooth-enabled card that can load two dozen other credit cards onto it. And because it's smart hardware, it can communicate with other apps, your phone and even has a small readout screen on the card itself. Binji's been in development for over a year and includes a bunch of functionality like P2P payments and early access to paychecks.
Binji launches today and we sit with CEO Ryan Marquis and CTO Joe Callahan to better understand the Binji product and the problems it addresses.
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The following excerpts were edited for clarity.
Founding story
We've been working together in stealth mode for almost a year to solve the consumer experience of too many cards in a wallet. We combine card consolidation technology, P2P payments and what we're seeing in the app-based banking world.
How Binji's card consolidation tech is different
We believe we're the most complete personal finance solution that's come to market. It entails our digital display Mastercard that allows anyone to load any number of debit or credit products from our app. From those products, they can fund their Binji card. Similar companies that attempted to come to market tried to do this all with a hardware solution. We're a hardware and software solution. All of the card consolidation from those cards to a Binji card occurs in our cloud.
Online and card-based banking
We're also an app-based banking solution. Consumers get an account and routing number. You can use direct deposit to fund an account and get paid two days early on a payday advance. We built out a full P2P payments platform so that Binji users can send each other money. We think Binji is a complete solution that can compete with the challenger banks.
Tech stack
With our experience in the tech space, we wanted to make sure we were vertically integrated. So, we took sole responsibility for the app, platform, and cloud environment. As opposed to bringing in other technology, we wanted to make sure we owned it, controlled it, and can expand it to make it interoperable with other environments.