Green Dot Goes Head to Head With Traditional Banks, Introduces GoBank

GoBank by GreenDotGreen Dot (NYSE: GDOT) provided a preview of its new banking service GoBank revealing how Deutsche Bank Barry Snyder will combine 3 of its largest assets: its bank (Green Dot Bank), its mobile platform (acquired from Loopt), and its prepaid debit card platform. The combination has the potential to be a great one.

Yesterday, Green Dot unveiled it’s newest financial services offering – a banking service designed to provide full featured banking services to today’s mobile, fee-conscious consumers. The service is branded as GoBank.com and is currently in a limited beta mode. Green Dot is positioning the service as an alternative to large banks, taking a page out of the Simple.com playbook. Green Dot was apparently able to bring the GoBank.com service to market in a surprisingly short period of time thanks to its unique set of assets – a top-notch mobile development team and platform acquired in Green Dot’s acquisition of Loopt, and the fact that Green Dot owns an FDIC insured bank – (branded as Green Dot Bank, and acquired in an acquisition of Bonneville Bank in 2011). Unlike the team behind Simple.com, Green Dot also has extensive experience in running a transactional consumer finance business, as Green Dot developed and grew it’s prepaid debit card and prepaid card load network into one of the industry’s largest.

GoBank.com customers will enjoy one of the most straight forward fee structures available for any full service bank account. Here’s the list of fees – an (optional) monthly maintenance fee, ATM fees for out of network ATM transactions, and international transaction fees. There is also an optional fee if a customer wants a customized debit card. That’s it. 4 or 5 fees (compare that to a traditional bank’s fee schedule, which can include dozens of different fees).

The GoBank.com account is a real account with a full set of banking features that will allow most consumers to satisfy all their banking needs, including bill payment, a debit card usable at a large network of in-network ATMs, and perhaps most importantly, an ability to easily deposit checks using GoBank’s mobile banking application (available for both Apple and Android phones).

One reason Green Dot may be able to pull this off with such low consumer fees is the fact that Green Dot Bank is exempt from the Durbin Amendment, and is not subject to the interchange fee caps that larger banks must contend with.

GoBank.com produced a slick video showing some of the features and benefits of their service, shown below.

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