Is my money safe at a bank I have never heard of?
It is held at Marrowdale under the same rules and the same deposit insurance that apply to every chartered bank. Fame is not one of the rules.
A money app and a steel card
A bank account, except we're not a bank.
My father kept a paper chequebook register. Every cheque went into it in pencil, in the car park, before he started the engine. He had one rule and he kept it for thirty-one years: the pencil is right until the bank proves otherwise. Twice, the bank was wrong. He brought it up at dinner for the rest of his life.
Haversack is that register, in your pocket, with the subtraction done for you. The money sits at a bank. The app sits in front of the bank. The card weighs 17 grams. Those three facts are the whole product. The heavy one comes first.
Spending, held at Marrowdale
$2,314.17
Savings $611.40 · updated 1 second ago
- Birchmoor Coffee 7:48 am. Rounded to $5.00. $4.60
- Round-up to savings The forty cents from the coffee. $0.40
- Gullwing Print Co., payroll Posted when it landed, not the next morning. +$1,912.40
- City transit pass Monthly. Same as last month. $98.00
01 The card
The card weighs 17 grams. The weight is the feature.
A plastic card weighs about five grams. Ours is stainless steel, so it weighs 17. Set it down on a table and it makes a short, flat sound that plastic cannot make, and at least one person looks over. We have tested this in restaurants. The result is consistent.
Here is what the steel does that plastic does not: nothing. Same chip, same antenna, same sixteen digits. It does not open a lounge, it does not come with a person who books your dinners, and it does not make the money behind it any heavier. It is a card, and it is heavy, and both facts are in the table so that neither surprises you later.
| Weight | 17 g |
|---|---|
| Material | Stainless steel, brushed |
| Chip | Yes. The standard kind. |
| Contactless | Yes |
| Numbers on the front | None. They are in the app. |
| What it does that plastic does not | Nothing. It is heavier. |
02 Round-ups
Round-ups save forty cents a coffee. Here is exactly what that comes to.
Each time you pay, the amount rounds up to the next dollar and the difference moves from spending to savings. Most apps explain this with a photograph of a jar. We would rather do the arithmetic in front of you.
A coffee costs $4.60. It rounds to $5.00. That is forty cents. Five coffees a week is $2.00. Fifty-two weeks is $104.
$104 is a good winter coat in the January sale, a year of replacement toothbrush heads, or the annual fee that a lot of steel cards charge. $104 is not a retirement, not a reason to buy a sixth coffee, and not a figure anyone should set in large type over a photograph of a beach.
What round-ups actually do is smaller and better than the figure. They make the saving happen in the same second as the spending, which is the only second in which anyone has ever reliably saved anything.
One coffee$4.60
Rounds up to$5.00
The difference$0.40
Five a week$2.00
Fifty-two weeks$104.00
03 Fees
No fees. Here is who is paying instead.
Every app with a steel card says "no fees", and every one of them has an office with people in it. The office is paid for by interchange. When you tap the card, the shop pays a small percentage of the sale to the card network. The network passes a share to the bank that issued the card, and the bank passes a share to us. You see a free app and a heavy card. The shop sees one more line on its monthly statement, a line it has been seeing since before we existed, and it has priced its coffee accordingly.
That is the entire business, in three columns. If you spend nothing, we earn nothing. We have made our peace with that.
| For | What you pay | What the merchant pays | What the partner bank earns |
|---|---|---|---|
| Keeping the account open | Nothing. | Nothing. | Nothing directly. It gets to hold your deposits. |
| Tapping the card | Nothing. | A small percentage of the sale, to the card network. Part of it comes to us. | A smaller part of the same slice. |
| Holding your money | Nothing. | Nothing. | What any bank earns on deposits: it lends some of them out. |
| The steel card | Nothing for the first one. $20 for a replacement. | Nothing. | Nothing. |
| Cash from a machine | Nothing from us. The machine's owner may charge its own fee, and the app shows it before you confirm. | Nothing. | Nothing. |
04 The partner bank
Where your money actually is
Your money is not in the app. The app is a screen. Your money is at Marrowdale Trust Company, a bank chartered in 1911 in a town of about six thousand people, and you have never heard of it. Neither had we, until the lawyers introduced us.
Marrowdale holds the deposits, settles the card payments, and answers to the bank regulators. Haversack builds the app, posts the card, and answers to you. When the app says your balance is $2,314.17, it is repeating what Marrowdale said a second ago.
The honest reason it works this way is that a bank charter takes years and we wanted to post a card this decade. There is also a glossy reason. It involves the word "ecosystem", and we have retired it.
If Haversack closed tomorrow, your money would still be at Marrowdale, which has outlived two wars, one flood, and the railway that used to stop there.
You
Holds: 17 grams of steel
Haversack
Holds: a screen and a very good list
Marrowdale Trust Company
Holds: the money
05 Disclosures
Disclosures, which we think are the best part
Most apps set these in grey nine-point type at the foot of the page and hope. We have set them here, in the font we use for amounts, because they are the part of the product we are proudest of.
-
01
Haversack is a financial technology company and not a bank. Banking services are provided by Marrowdale Trust Company. This sentence is also printed on the back of the card, in a size you can read without glasses.
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02
The Haversack card is issued by Marrowdale Trust Company under licence from a card network whose mark appears on the card. It works wherever that mark is accepted, which is most places and not all places.
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03
Round-ups move your own money from your spending balance to your savings balance. They do not create money. Nothing in this app creates money, and we would be suspicious of an app that said it did.
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04
Any interest paid on savings balances is paid by Marrowdale Trust Company at a rate Marrowdale sets and may change. We do not print the rate here because it would be a different number by the time you read it.
06 Questions
Six questions people ask, and what we say
Why is the card so heavy?
Because steel is heavy. We could have made it lighter and chose not to. You will know why the first time you set it down.
What happens if I lose it?
Freeze it in the app in two taps. We post a new one for $20, which is what the steel and the postage cost us. We are not trying to earn money on your bad day.
Does it work abroad?
Anywhere the network mark on the card is accepted. We add no foreign transaction fee. The exchange rate is the network's rate on the day, which we show you before the charge settles and do not control.
Do you sell my data?
No. We earn money when you tap the card. We do not need a second business, and the first one is easier to explain at dinner.
Why trust a company that keeps saying it is not a bank?
Because the alternative is a company that lets you assume it is one. We would rather be the people who told you where the money is than the people who were vague about it in a larger font.
07 The pencil
The pencil did not need a partner bank.
My father's register did one thing. It told him, before he spent the money, whether he had the money. It did this in pencil, in a car park, with no app, no steel, and no bank in a town of six thousand.
Haversack does the same thing in about a second, with the subtraction done for you and the forty cents already moved. It took a chartered bank, a card network and 17 grams of stainless steel to match one man with a pencil. He would have found that funny. Then he would have checked our arithmetic.