Bee App Offers Mobile Banking for Underserved Communities

By: David Holley
Banks have long been looking to innovate in an industry that doesn’t change much and, in recent years, has been shrinking. Almost 1,900 bank branches closed in the U.S. in the years after the financial crisis between 2008 and 2013, according to data from Bloomberg News and the U.S. Census.

New York-based One Financial Holdings, founded in 2014, is a relatively new entrant to the expanding sector with the goal of providing financial services to an underserved market: lower-income communities. Those groups have been more severely impacted by bank branch closures, with 93 percent occurring in postal codes that had household income around or below the U.S. median, according to the 2013 Bloomberg report.

One Financial Holdings has created a mobile app service it calls Bee that offers online banking services meant to replace traditional checking accounts, and help people with low incomes pay less for costly fee-driven services, such as check cashing…read more.