MAJORITY, a Texas-based mobile banking platform aimed at migrants, announced a $19 million seed funding round and service expansion to all 50 US states Tuesday, according to a press release.
The company says it will use the funding to prepare for expansion into new migrant communities across the United States, in addition to scaling technology and operations.
The round was led by Valar Ventures and included participation from Avid Ventures, Heartcore Capital and multiple Nordic fintech unicorn founders.
Founded in 2019 by CEO Magnus Larsson, CTO Johan Dahlqvist and COO Johan Granlund, MAJORITY started operations in Texas and Florida with a focus on Nigerian and Cuban communities.
“We’re going to continue into more communities. We’re expanding into other African communities in the US and we’re also expanding into more Hispanic communities. And, of course, the second side of the funding as well is to continue building out the product to just, you know cater with services that are better and better and better,” Larsson said in an interview with FinLedger.
MAJORITY charges a $5 monthly subscription in exchange for its service tools which include FDIC-insured accounts, Visa debit cards, early direct deposit, no-fee remittances, community discounts, personalized advisors and at-cost international calling.
Larsson said that while the company does have a product roadmap for the future, right now, it is focused on expanding existing services such as the card and remittance services to new communities.
The market for migrant and immigrant financial services has begun to fill out in the past year, with companies like Fair and Simba also offering digital banking and financial services aimed at the demographic.
Larsson says that MAJORITY separates itself from the competition through a strong proprietary technology foundation and representatives which are actually from the communities the platform serves.
“Most [competitors] are 100% digital. We are working with what we call an advisor program, where we actually have people from the communities,” he said, “to build our product and build our company together with the communities, and I think that’s what we’re changing.”
MAJORITY hires community members as brand ambassadors, who then pitch the product to friends, family and other community members to increase awareness of the financial services they offer.
“I think it would be a shame to think that I could be representative or you know, for all the different migrant groups in the US,” Larsson added about the importance of community representatives.
Larsson echoed a common roadblock for scaling financial technologies, saying the company’s “biggest challenges are, of course, continuing portions of our licensing and our compliance programs, which is always time consuming work in the US, since you have a state-by-state kind of principle.”
“But in general, I think we’ve built a scalable model that we’ve proven. We really wanted to make sure to show, you know, the proof is in the pudding, so this year we can continue moving to some of the larger communities also in the US.”
Another Texas-based, immigrant-focused fintech platform, Fair, recently announced its public launch after raising $20 million directly from the immigrant communities it serves. In other fintech news, UK-based fintech provider Revolut announced a 57% increase in revenue and 90% decrease in quarterly adjusted losses.