Fintech South 2023: Dara Albright with Worthy

Intro: Broadcasting live from the beautiful Georgia World Congress Center for FinTech South. 2023. It’s time for Atlanta Business Radio. Now, here’s your host.

Lee Kantor: Lee Kantor here, FinTech South. 2023 Broadcasting Live, celebrating fintech leaders from around the world. Right now on the show, we have Dara Albright, an old friend from Worthy. Welcome, Dara.

Dara Albright: How are you? Thanks for having me here.

Lee Kantor: I am doing well. I’m so excited to learn what you’re up to. Tell us a little bit about Worthy.

Dara Albright: So Worthy is an awesome, awesome company. Essentially, what worthy is? I like to kind of describe it as an acorns on steroids. Essentially it is. It’s it’s two things. First of all, the mission of Worthy is to help small investors access greater yield and save for retirement. The mission. It’s a worthy one, actually, where we’re out there, we’re really trying to help people and trying to help thwart a looming retirement crisis that we have right now. So essentially, what worthy does and how we do that is we have a fintech app which enables users to go every time they go shopping. They. Let’s say you go to Publix, you spend $99.50 at Publix, you pay $100.50, goes into your worthy roundup app. So similar to like an acorns, right? So you’re accumulating your roundups so you don’t even know that that you know, that that you’re actually saving while you’re shopping. The difference between worthy and an acorns, however, is that whereas acorns you’re only they tell you there are certain ETFs where where you could put your money in with worthy and you don’t know the you know the volatility and all of that with worthy. Worthy has its own proprietary product which is a worthy bond that yields 6% and it is no fees, fully liquid and available in minimum $10 clips. So I mean, essentially for, you know, less than the price of two Starbucks, you know, you could be having a bond and getting started on your, you know, financial journey.

Lee Kantor: And then how does that does that rate change? Like how long is that rate going to be in effect?

Dara Albright: So we started off with 5%. And this was we’ve been around for a couple of years now since around 2015, 2016. So since, you know, back then, as you know, rates were quite low. Now the rates have we we start we raise them to help people fight and combat inflation. So we went to 5.5%. And now now this. So this one will be 5.5%. This we went to six for we’re doing a six for six promotion. So six for six months. And then then probably go back down to the 5.5% or 5.73% APY But we’ll see how, you know, Worthy will gauge how the, you know, how the economy is doing and what’s happening with inflation. And, you know, we like to give our our users and customers raises, so to speak.

Lee Kantor: So and it’s one of those things that every $10 I’m accumulating, I could just get I can just kind of pop it into that fund.

Dara Albright: Yeah, exactly. So you could actually you could actually buy bonds on your own if you wanted to, and you could just, you know, buy as many as you. Well, not as many as you want. They’re capped because we really want this to be a retail product, right? So, I mean, you could go you could buy up to I think it’s $50,000 worth of bonds if you wanted to. But if you just wanted to use the roundup, you could do that, too. And then every time you get to $10 in round ups, it automatically.

Lee Kantor: Automatically just puts in. Now, when that’s occurring, your target then is like, who is your target market?

Dara Albright: So it really for for smaller investors, it’s for people who are looking for a different type of saving solution and easier type of saving solution. It’s also people for a lot of gig workers, people who don’t have traditional, you know, you don’t have a pension, they don’t have a, you know, a 401. K, So it’s really for the people. And they’re really a large percentage of people now in the US that are really outside of the traditional retirement market.

Lee Kantor: Now, is it something that it rounds up, you know, whatever. It changes under a dollar. Can you set it to round up more?

Dara Albright: So, yeah, you could. You could have automatic. No. Well that. No, that the round ups. That’s the way you know, you’re just so you.

Lee Kantor: Can only round up the cents to the.

Dara Albright: Nearest dollar but.

Lee Kantor: You can’t say round up to the nearest $5 or the nearest $10.

Dara Albright: No, but what you could do, you could. There are other ways that you could, you know, kind of play around with it. So. But no, you can’t you can’t do that. It only goes to the nearest dollar.

Lee Kantor: But there are ways to if you want to just incrementally invest more, you could do that. That’s doable.

Dara Albright: You could do that on your own.

Lee Kantor: So now talk about the what was the genesis of the idea of somebody just wanted to just do a better Acorn? That was a.

Dara Albright: No. So so this was actually So Sally, Who’s here? Sally? Sally Outlaw, who’s the the CEO of Worthy and our fierce leader. She I’ve known her for a while now. She’s she’s actually one of the crowdfunding leaders pioneers. She actually wrote the book Cash for the Crowd. So she literally wrote the book for crowdfunding. And she came up with this idea I said was around the 2015 time frame. And she told me about the idea. And this was this was actually. I want to say around maybe the same time as acorns. But really there was really it didn’t really have anything to do with acorns. Acorns. But she her her vision in this was she was looking at at the time being in the crowdfunding space helping a lot of these small businesses access capital. And then at the same time it was, you know, we also want to be able to give opportunities to smaller retail investors that didn’t have those same investment opportunities as institutional investors, Right. So that’s really where sort of so.

Lee Kantor: This was the mechanism that she thought of to do that. Exactly.

Dara Albright: Exactly. And she wants to make it as easy, you know, as easy as possible. And then and then, you know, work to create Worthy’s own proprietary financial products. And so what we did was so the the product is SEC qualified, so it’s qualified by the SEC. So it’s a under the reg A+ exemption. So the difference between like a bank, like let’s say for example, you know, if you go to a bank and you deposit your money into a bank, your savings account or a CD, you know, what have you, you’re giving the bank your money and the bank, basically, What do they pay you? I mean, nothing.

Lee Kantor: Basically 0.1 or 0.01 or I mean even negligible, right?

Dara Albright: Even recently we saw there was a there was a advertisement for a bank that was advertising a 6% savings account. But then if you read the fine print, it was 6% on the first thousand dollars deposited and then it was like 0.01, right?

Lee Kantor: Like they’re hoping you don’t read that much, right? Right. The fine print.

Dara Albright: So the difference is, you know, worthy. So the way worthy is able to give out the 6% were they invest in different real estate projects.

Lee Kantor: So that’s the engine behind it is real estate investing.

Dara Albright: Exactly. And this one in this fund we’ve also done for small businesses, we’ve done inventory lending in the past. So these are types of products that traditionally get higher yields, but mostly only, you know, institutional and larger accredited investors have access to. So what worthy does is uses the reg A+ exemption to create a new product for retail investors. So, you know, the the difference between what worthy would make investing in, let’s say, you know, a real estate project and then they’ll give the consumer, the client, the 6%.

Lee Kantor: That’s why the consumer gets a better return.

Dara Albright: Exactly right. Because, you know, we’re basically the worthy is not under the umbrella of of the feds that are telling them how much, you know, interest rates are and and where you should be.

Lee Kantor: So so now what’s worthy? Why are they here at FinTech South?

Dara Albright: So Sally and I are both speaking on a panel tomorrow, talking about really helping, you know, smaller investors access, you know, all these types of of products and how fintech is really helping also underserved communities. So we’re all going to be talking about that tomorrow where we’ve got a booth here and just, you know, talking to people, meeting people.

Lee Kantor: So where is worthy at in kind of their growth curve? Are they just expanding? Is that that that’s what you need more of? It’s just more people kind of downloading the app.

Dara Albright: Exactly. Exactly. So worthy is has done already just recently crossed $200 million in bond sales. Wow. You know over the years. So yeah, now we’re growing. You know, the people like the product and we’re looking, you know, in the future to build upon that and launch all sorts of different products for retail investors and give them, you know, a lot more. And it’s not.

Lee Kantor: Just retail like your definition of retail, you want to be as broad as possible to involve as many people who are maybe not the typical like a bank customer. You want to get more people that are maybe some of the unbanked, some of those folks as well.

Dara Albright: Well, I think you still would need to have it because you still you still connect through bank. So it’s so I wouldn’t say so much the unbanked, but I would say it’s more of the it’s more that the small investor or the smaller investor that doesn’t think that they have the wherewithal to save. They don’t feel like they have, you know, extra. They don’t have extra money. You know that they’re living paycheck to paycheck. This is an option for you. So it’s I think it just brings more people into, you know, financial services and helping them, you know, really save for retirement and and build a financial future.

Lee Kantor: So if somebody wants to learn more, where should they go?

Dara Albright: They could go to worthy bonds.com. And there’s tons of information.

Lee Kantor: They can download the app from that website.

Dara Albright: Yeah, you can find all the information there. We companies based in Florida. We also just recently opened an office in Alpharetta. So we’re right here in. Yep, in, in good old Georgia. And I do want to say, too, so, you know, I compared it a lot to banks. It is not FDIC insured, so it’s under a different regulatory framework. So I just want to make sure I get that out there, too, as a disclaimer.

Lee Kantor: And then. Well, thank you so much, Daryl, for sharing your story today. You’re doing important work and we appreciate you.

Dara Albright: Yeah, Thank you so much. Thank you for all you guys do.

Lee Kantor: All right. This is Lee Kantor. We’ll be back in a few in FinTech South 2023.