A neobank for college students (Gen Z)? 🤔; A DAO trying to free Julian Assange 👀; Should PayPal’s Venmo worry about Zelle’s crazy growth? 🤯

Good Morning FinTech, February 7

Good day Everyone,

And happy Monday! I hope that your weekend was relaxing and fruitful. To make the best start of a new week, I invite you to explore 3 great FinTech stories that I’ve prepared for you today:

A neobank for college students (Gen Z)? 🤔

The news 📰 EdTech Mos wants to be the neobank for college students that it first serves via scholarship links, and founder Amira Yahyaoui sees a clear path forward, according to TechCrunch.

More on this 👉 Human rights activist and Mos founder Amira Yahyaoui couldn’t afford to go to college, so when she first launched a platform to connect students to scholarships, the innovation felt full circle, TechCrunch reported. Since its 2017 inception, Mos has opened access to a pool of over $160B in financial aid to the more than 400k students within its community.

Now, hoping to tear down yet another financial barrier that she herself faced, Yahyaoui is expanding Mos into a challenger bank. It’s an evolution from Mos as an EdTech business built to help students navigate their way through applying and attending college into a fintech that can support the same user base through all of life’s similarly complicated demands.

Some more data 📊 Here’s some more interesting data on Moss:

• Mos recently bagged $40M from a Series B round with a $400M valuation.

• Its steps into neobanking within the past year include a debit-card rollout. Mos’s revenue mix now includes fees for scholarship access and interchange.

• The debit card has no charges for overdrafts or ATM-network status; it also lacks late fees and balance minimums.

• More than 100k students have opened accounts during the initial quarter for the card’s rollout, Yahyaoui told TechCrunch and estimated that Mos has become the 10th largest US neobank.

Can Mos succeed and make a difference in the US neobanking space? Here’s the takeaway: