Empower Finance offers a mobile-first banking product that aggregates users’ bank and credit card accounts to recommend saving, spending, budgeting and cost-cutting actions. The company pairs AI-driven insights with access to human financial planners and has launched its own checking account and a savings product yielding 1.60% APY with no minimums, no overdraft fees and unlimited withdrawals. Empower charges users $6 per month and says that customers save roughly $300 a year in fees and on average $1,300 more annually. The company reports more than 600,000 active users and about 35 employees. Empower positions itself against a crowded field of digital banks and personal-finance apps, arguing its branchless model and modern tech stack remove 60–70% of legacy cost structure. Empower is a San Francisco, CA-based financial technology company led by CEO and co-founder Warren Hogarth. It operates a mobile bank and app (iOS and Android) that offers 1% cashback on debit purchases, 1.85% annual percentage yield on savings accounts, and no maintenance, foreign transaction fees, or account minimums. Members can access checking and savings for free at over 25,000 ATMs and are reimbursed for out-of-network ATM use worldwide. The service includes an artificial intelligence-powered assistant to help members make improved financial decisions. The company raised $4.5m and intends to use the funds to accelerate development of its new product offering, Empower banking. Empower launched an iOS mobile app that aggregates accounts from more than 1,000 supported banks to give users an overview of day-to-day transactions and spending behavior. The app includes tools to transfer money between accounts, automate a percentage-based savings feature into users' own accounts, and categorizes transactions using in-house data cleaning and a crowdsourced category database. Empower emphasizes security (256-bit AES at rest, 256-bit SSL in transfer, PCI-compliant storage) and partners directly with financial providers rather than only scraping data. Future product plans described in the article include bill payments, debt-paydown tools, recommending high-interest savings accounts, loan-refinancing suggestions, and potential integrations with robo-advisors for investment flows. The San Francisco-based team of five is led by founder Warren Hogarth and co-founder Justin Ammerlaan; an Android version is planned for release in a few months. The app is free on iTunes.

Total raised

$25M

Funding rounds

3

Latest round

Series A

Latest activity

Mar 2020