Current’s Stuart Sopp on building a bank with customers’ best interests in mind
- As a trader, Stuart Sopp thought he could do more to help the people not being served by the banking system.
- His challenger bank Current targets people living paycheck to paycheck and teens.
When you talk to the founders of many of the leading challenger banks, you sense that they each have a touch of revolutionary in them. They see the present financial services system as broken — some more, some less — and their firms are out to provide better options for the bulk of people out there.
Stuart Sopp’s the CEO of Current. Growing up through the industry as a trader, Sopp made a decision midway through his career to leave his job as a trader and build a challenger bank that’s targeting Millennials and Gen Z with lower — or no — fees and early direct deposit. Current saw 200,000 new users in April and May during the height of the Corona crisis. The company has more than 1 million active accounts.
Sopp joins us to talk about the genesis of Current and how it’s helping its target customers. In a crowded field, he describes how Current differentiates itself from the other offerings out there. Sopp tells us how he thinks he can double his userbase in 2020.
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The following excerpts were edited for clarity.
Current’s positioning
Distribution is changing. We have gone from branch network to the Internet. When we founded Current, few had gone fully mobile. In the 2010s, we experienced peek iPhone.
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