Kevin Nazemi, CEO of Charlie, on building a trusted fintech serving seniors

It is something of a mystery that virtually no fintech entrepreneurs have tackled one of the biggest markets there is: senior citizens collecting social security. Well, until now.

In this episode, I sit down with Kevin Nazemi, CEO and co-founder of Charlie, to explore serving this large market. With over 60 million Americans in this demographic, Kevin explains why traditional banks and fintechs have largely ignored this population despite their significant needs. The conversation dives deep into Charlie's innovative approach to serving customers 62 and above, including their groundbreaking fraud prevention tools like "Speed Bump" that have already documented a significant amount of prevented fraud, and how they're building trust in a market where respect and security are paramount.

In this podcast you will learn:

• His formative interview with a sitting president at the age of 11.
• How he became convinced that seniors needed better financial services.
• Why senior citizens are generally ignored by banks and fintechs.
• How Kevin realized he could build a real business serving this population.
• How they communicated that Charlie works with a partner bank.
• Why it was so important to have their partner bank front and center.
• How Charlie makes money and how it compares to other fintech leaders.
• The obvious product they could expand into.
• What they are doing to protect their customers from fraud.
• How they are combating the rise in AI-driven fraud.
• Kevin’s vision for the future of Charlie.

Connect with Fintech One-on-One:

• Tweet me @PeterRenton
• Connect with me on LinkedIn
• Find previous Fintech One-on-One episodes

Transcript

Episode 551 – Kevin Nazemi

Peter Renton:

Today's episode is brought to you by the AI Native Banking and Fintech Conference, happening in Salt Lake City on September 30. This event, hosted by Spring Labs and in its second year, is all about practical applications of AI that are in production at banks today. There'll be no hype, no fluff at this event, just real-world use cases for banks and fintechs. Join the more than 400 people who will be learning about AI solutions they can purchase today. There'll be big name keynotes, panels of bankers comparing notes, case studies, and demos from some of the cutting edge AI companies. Use the coupon code PODCAST20 to receive 20 % off your ticket at conference.springlabs.com. 

Kevin Nazemi:

If you zoom out, there are 30 or so consumer banks at scale and four that are just monstrous in size. And you could measure the scale in different ways, but those 30 all have enterprise values of 10 billion or more. And then the monster size ones, the names everyone's heard of, $100 billion or more. But there's not one that out of 34 big ones that serves these 60 million people who live off of social security, right? And wakes up every day and thinks about, them and their unique needs set. I think that, you know, part of the reason is that this population as a whole doesn't fit into the contours of what typically will get the banking system excited.

PR: This is the Fintech One-on-One podcast, the show for Fintech enthusiasts looking to better understand the leaders shaping Fintech and banking today. My name is Peter Renton and since 2013, I've been conducting in-depth interviews with Fintech founders and banking executives. Today on the show, we are talking about one of the largest addressable markets in all of finance, but one that has been consistently ignored by most Fintech entrepreneurs as well as bankers. I'm talking about senior citizens who are collecting social security. I'm delighted to welcome Kevin Nazemi, the CEO and co-founder of Charlie. Now, Kevin has thought deeply about the unique financial challenges facing seniors and has built a company specifically for this large and growing market. Charlie is built around trust and fraud prevention. And it is the kind of fintech company that you can tell your parents or grandparents about.

Now let's get on with the show.

Welcome to the podcast, Kevin.

KN: It's a pleasure to be with you.

PR: Great to have you. I like to get these started by giving a little bit of background, but when I was reading up about you, I think you're probably the only person I've had on the show that I know of that has interviewed a president. And you're certainly the only person I know of who interviewed a president when they were 11 years old. So why don't you get started by telling us that story before we get into it.

KN: You bet. I, when I was in the sixth grade, my local elementary school partnered up with the local NBC affiliate for the students to do news segments during the Saturday morning cartoons. And I raised my hand and said, I want to interview the president of the United States. It got some chuckles. And then I ended up writing a letter to the White House, got a coloring book back and called them for three weeks. And there was a very nice person at the White House who's now a dear friend who took me seriously and granted me the one-on-one interview, which lasted about 25 minutes. And so it's a very formative experience for me, as you can imagine happening in at such a young age and really the basis and template for entrepreneurship, given that you've got to have an idea that's a bit out there from where the world's operating today. And then you've got to convince people who are…to believe in you. Right. That's that's that was that experience and it was just featured on CBS, which I think is maybe why you found it. Yes, I did. thought you keep quiet about it before.

PR: Right. Well, I saw it, apparently it was President Clinton, right? A sitting president. apparently he recently tweeted about you as well.

KN: He did, he did. So part of the CBS segment, they were kind enough to reunite us years later. This happened in 1993, so quite a while ago. And they reunited us in Washington, DC. And then following the segment airing, he tweeted about the segment and was honored by it, of course.

PR: Yeah, that's a fantastic story. So let's get into your, you know, your work background after the age of 11. You don't have a typical FinTech CEO background. You spend a lot of time in healthcare. Tell us some of the highlights of your career to date.

KN: You bet. So I started my career at Microsoft and then since then I've been an entrepreneur. And as you mentioned, I started in the healthcare space. I was the co-founder and co-CEO of Oscar Health Insurance. You we took out a blank sheet of paper to reimagine health insurance for individuals at a time when the Affordable Care Act was coming to be. My foray into fintech came from a family health issue. My father was having some health issues and I thought, you know, I'm a health insurance co-founder and co-CEO. I can help you navigate this stuff. It's going to be easy. I can navigate the health insurance. I can navigate the healthcare system. And, I was humbled very quickly and realized really quickly that, as you age, your finances and your health are so interrelated. right. Cause your healthcare costs go up and you tend to…most Americans live on a fixed income, to the extent they have anything saved, they're decumulating, they're not really generating income, and most people are living off of a social security check given that pensions aren't around anymore. And I reconcile that with financial services as they existed and the footprint. And I became convinced, along with my co-founders, that this segment is being ignored and deserved better. And that was the pivot for me to financial services and the start of Charlie, the company that I'm currently working on. I just say, you know, healthcare, just given its cost on the macro level, on the individual level, it's the closest adjacency to FinTech if you think about it, you know, in the sense that it really has a dramatic effect on, at the macro and individual level.

PR: Right, right. Yes, it's really interesting because, you know, I've been thinking about this for a while and this is probably the biggest addressable market out there that doesn't have, you know, 25 competitors going after it. It's, it really is pretty amazing that I wouldn't say it's been completely ignored, but for the most part, no one's focusing on it. And maybe we can talk about what it is about senior citizens, we're talking about, I mean you say on your website 62 and above, which I know is when the age when you can first take social security. What is it about this population? Why are they so underserved?

KN: Yes, so there, as you say, I think they're generally ignored and it's not that they can't engage in financial services companies serve them every day. But if you zoom out, you know, there are 30 or so consumer banks at scale and four that are just monstrous in size and you could, you know, measure the scale in different ways, but those 30 all have enterprise values of 10 billion or more. And then the monster size ones, you know, are the names everyone's heard of, you know, $100 billion or more, but there's not one that out of 34 big ones that serves these 60 million people who live off of social security, right? And wakes up every day and thinks about them and their unique needs set. And I think that part of the reason is that this population as a whole doesn't fit any of the contours of what typically will get the banking system excited, which is either you know, you are generating a lot of income, right? Or you're rich and you have assets that, you know, they can help you with and in turn, you know, get monetization through. So whereas two thirds of Americans who receive social security are living social security check to social security check. That defines the typical, you know, American retiree. And so as a result of that, that kind of incompatibility with the core approach that banking typically takes. They're the people who stand in line, pay monthly fees, don't get interest on their money, and they're left vulnerable to fraud because they're on the front lines of fraud. And because they're on a fixed income, if they're hit by you know, $500 worth of fraud when the average social security check is $1,700. That's not an administrative nuisance. That is your financial oxygen, you know, not being available to you. And there's a whole bunch of, course, beyond the financial impact it has, there's a whole bunch of emotional impact that something like that has, and they're not geared to that. and they just kind of, you know, just, think about a system that for rewarding people within these institutions, it's like, much assets do you have? Right? Is that growing? It's not thinking about decumulating assets, which is, the way that the typical everyday retiree is thinking about their life.

PR: I want to get into the fraud piece in a little bit, but before we do that, it's interesting that this large segment has been ignored by the big banks and even by fintechs for the most part. When did you realize that your assumption that this could actually be a real business? I mean, it's one thing to say, let's serve this population. It's another thing to say, well, I can make this a real business. How did that kind of come about?

KN: Yeah, so this is an interesting one. And I think part of it too, and you hit on something, it's not just say banks or banking, but it's also tech. And I think part of the reason is, it's very natural for you to build things that you can relate to and that solve problems that are in front of you. And think myself and my co-founders, we all are now over 40. We were just hitting it when we started, Charlie. And we are of a generation whose parents are now shifting in various slopes from us being the dependents to them being the dependent, right? In some way. And that varies a lot across folks. And so I think what one is that we were of the right age and had parents that we experienced were dealing with that shift that was happening. In my case, it happened to be acute because there was suddenly this major health thing.

The second thing is that we took out a blank sheet of paper and said, what if we re-imagined what things could be like? And would this audience find it compelling? Because I think the risk with us is that we are not over the age of 62. And there's always this paranoia you have to have as an entrepreneur, which is this might be great on slides and whatever, but at the end of the day, and rightfully so, and I think this also prevented a lot of people from going into this space is this is a trust category. And if your objective…this is probably the banking relationship is probably the longest commercial relationship that people over the age of 60 have had in their life. Right. And so now you're telling them to trust you, a newbie with, with something or do something different, not to mention, you know, that, that I think, you know, another, challenge and mistake is that they're not a monolith. There's a lot of variants in their tech abilities, but generally speaking, right? It's fair to assume that people who are younger in their professional career are going to be more tech comfortable than, the strata of people who are over the age of 60. But when we took out that blank sheet of paper, we pinned down three things. One, we could get them more for their money, right? And those are in some obvious ways, but ways that the system doesn't do that for them today. So you get a competitive rate on the deposits that you have. We don't charge you monthly fees or, or minimums. You get your social security check three to five days earlier, to be able to use it. 

The second piece is just an experience that was built for them. And, and, know, that's not just like bigger fonts. it's about taking out, just the, the 600 sub menus that exist with a typical, you know, 3000 square foot box that's serving these folks. That's also trying to serve student loan constituencies and retailers and, you know, on and home equity customers and on and on and on. And, and we do that through a tile-based interface that really declutters and takes out the things that aren't there and then back it up with 24/7 live customer support. Right. So that if you have an issue, can talk to someone and you feel that there's someone there, you know, behind that. And then the last thing, which I know you want to talk about later is we built in a whole set of fraud protections right into the chassis of the account. And so we put that in front of folks. We built this site called solverscard.com. And we said, coming soon. And we bought some ads on Facebook and some customers came like, great, you know, cause I've launched things where nobody comes. Right. And we got excited and then more customers came and more came and more came. And then what we did is we actually offered them money to sit down with them over Zoom and understand why did you sign up for this thing? Like they were signing up for saying it's coming soon. Sign up to be notified when it's available in your city. And we found that again, they felt like they were being ignored. They were being treated like a number. These people had been the everything and it's everyone. They've done their part, right? They were the coach, the disciplinarian, the budget balancer, the ride to events. And now it should be their turn, but it kind of feels like it's not, even though they did the things they were supposed to do. And it just felt like they were treated like a number and they're getting charged fees. it just didn't, the equation didn't make sense. And I use the word respect because I think they felt like they weren't respected. And that gave us the motivation to say, wait a second, there's so much that we could do for them. And if we just wake up every day thinking about their needs, and that's where now we have your tens of thousands of customers, they bring their social security check to us every single day. That's a lot of trust. But we wanted to test it because you just, you can conceive of a lot of stuff, but at the end of the day, I'm not the arbiter of whether it's good or not. It's the customer who has to take their longest tenured commercial relationship and shift their financial oxygen over to a group of people who don't have the history that the 3000 square foot box with a big logo has on it, even though they're letting them down.

PR: Right. So I noticed when you're on your homepage, the very top of your homepage, says deposits held at Sutton bank member FDIC. Now, obviously that's a, that's a design decision you made not to hide it down the bottom where pretty much every FinTech does. Obviously that's talking about the trust element that you just had. So most of our listeners are going to know that, every FinTech has a partner bank. That's where how it works. But I imagine your target audience probably didn't realize that. And so how did you communicate that?

PR: We decided with a really simple premise and everything that we did that should guide people in making decisions, which is, would you put it in front of your parents? Not what's everyone else doing or like what's going to make conversion higher or what, what, and that guided everything that we did, including our partnership with Sutton bank. You know, they've been around since the mid 1800s. We've been to Attica to the original branch and their headquarters. And they've got a lot of at scale programs that they partner with. And why we did that is a couple of things. Is one, like we want them to know that when they deposit money with us, it's backed by the full faith and credit of the United States government. That's not something we can provide as a fintech. That's something that a chartered bank could provide. And we think that's important to be upfront about that.

I think the second thing is that, you know, when you move over your social security direct deposit over, it is going into Sutton bank account, right? Even as a result of that, if you get a letter from the Social security Administration, it's going to say Sutton bank. And, and we don't want that moment where someone gets that letter and gasps and says, my gosh, what is this? I don't know what Sutton bank is. At Attica, Ohio, I've never been there. My security check is gone, right? And that might sound, this is again, like investing and knowing in the audience and really meeting them where they are and just the power that focus brings versus kind of the one size fits all, but that's what happens, right? And then if they don't know, and if they don't have that connection abundantly clear, and we don't just do the top of our page and the funnel pervasively, we actually do it in the welcome kit, there's a insert that's in there that, that, that's got like caution tape around it to make them really, really aware. Because in those few instances where someone didn't make that connection, it's heartbreaking because they literally will think that they were defrauded. They may drive all the way to the Social Security Administration, file a fraud report, declare that they never had any relationship with this thing. And then that doesn't get resolved like overnight. So now they're sitting with this cloud and fear for likely weeks until the dots connect in the situation. Let's get in front of that. Let's create moments where they're delighted and enjoying the experience, not where we're trying to push them through and then bring the context of what they're getting themselves into later. That's not a trust building relationship.

PR: Right. And I also see on their 24/7 phone support. So imagine that's talking to a human, not an AI bot. Um, and, uh, so that's, that's another piece, but you know, all these things, mean, it all sounds great, but the thing that I keep thinking about is how do you make money? How can this be like, there's probably inherently more costs involved in serving this community. Um, and fewer options to make money because they're probably they're not going to take out a student loan. They may take out a loan at some point for home improvements or what have you, but they've passed their heavy lending years for the most part. So how do you think about it financially? Firstly, what are the revenue sources and how are you thinking about getting to profitability?

KN: So today, our core revenue sources aligned with the user's activity. We don't charge monthly fees. And so where we get our revenue is through interchange fees. So when they use that debit card, which every Charlie customers issued, and I should add, it's a personalized debit card experience. You can embed the photo of your grandkid or pet or any loved one on it. And it's something that, again, this audience really likes to do, this segment really likes to do, that when you use it, we get a portion of what the merchant, you know, in our case pays Visa. And that translates for us to well over $200 of revenue per year per customer. putting that next to Chime, which supplements it with, they're not quite lending products, but kind of these sort of spot payments. I don't know formally if they're lending or not, but these sort of extending your budget say beyond your balance type products, you know, they're in the 250s, 270s after decades at it. But that is what we see consistently. And the reason is that every one of our customers brings over their social security direct deposit and typically you end up spending that. And so we're very aligned and there's no extra fee and whatnot. And I'd say that probably the big area that's unique to this audience to unlock for us is the fact that most people in this audience own their home and they tend to be house rich and cash poor. That is an amazing opportunity for a trusted financial partner to unlock. Now, whether we do that directly or via partnership, but you know, if you're just to conceptualize, right? If you are living...social security check to social security check and the average social security check is around $1,700 But you've got a house that's fully paid off Imagine selling 10 % of that house and now supplementing that social security check by 30 % every month for the next 10 or 15 years that could go a long way and could be an elegant instrument that could solve a lot of problems for people right you have to be focused on that you have to really understand that consumer and you got to make sure that you also overcome the fact that understandably, right? They want to age in place and the sort of products that have been introduced to them in that realm, like reverse mortgages are seen as predatory. So they're going to lean back, right? So this is also like it's us. So why do we start with a better banking account? Because if we showed that we can deliver them more for their money, help keep it safe, back it by service, which by the way, you look on the platforms, this is a very hard audience to serve, but we've got an average rating of 4.5. It oscillates between 4.5 and 4.6 between the platforms TrustPilot, App Store, Google Play Store, even a Vanguard, right? Who I would look up to, right, will have a 4.7 in the Apple Store and they've got a 3.3 in the Google Store, because it's not an easy segment to serve, then you build trust. And if you build trust, then that opens the door for us to come and say, listen, we've delivered the way that we said with your core banking experience. Now, hey, there's an opportunity where you could get a home-powered pension. Here's how the concept works. You stay in your home, you sell 10 % of it today. Here's what it would mean for you. Here's the transparency and that same philosophy of the, like, what would we put in front of our parents? Is it the only thing that we would do? Here's the transaction costs associated with it. Here's the trade-offs that are there. Do you want Charlie to be that partner for that sort of thing? That is where we hope to take it down the road. 

PR: I love that product for people in that situation. We've got a neighbor who moved into his house in like 1968 and he's now, I think he's like 82 and he retired a long time ago, but he always complains to me about the property tax. I'm like, oh, the property tax is so high. And it is, but he's got a really good investment that he's not tapping because it's like probably, I don't know. I don't know what he paid for it, but it's probably gone up at least 10X, maybe 20X from the time he paid it. And it's obviously paid off decades ago. But yeah, so it's a great product, I think, just getting over that trust piece. But anyway, I want to talk about fraud because this is probably the biggest issue with this population. It's actually getting a lot more play, I see in the media these days, about the fact that. This is that we need to do something to protect for elder fraud. So tell us about Fraud Shield and what you're doing to really help protect these people.

KN: You bet. Let me just start by saying fraud is a tsunami already. And that's the, you know, it's quantified at, at, over $30 billion a year. That's just what's reported from seniors. But remember a lot of people don't report it because they're so ashamed. And I would say the thing about fraud, you know, I'm coming at it from banking for older people. I think they are the, you know, canary in the coal mine leading indicator of what's going to hit everybody else because the fraudsters on the front lines and now enabled by AI, who are they going to attack first? Right? The population they think is going to be the most receptive and responsive to their fraud, which is older people, who are going to be less tech savvy. So I think learning from them is applicable to anyone's experience. And we see a lot on the front lines of that. so what guided our approach to was that the data shows that if you're aware of how a fraud or scam works, right then you're 80 % less likely to fall for it. It's as simple as that, right? But you have to make them aware and you can't make people numb to it because no one likes being talked down to. And so we embedded a whole set of tools that we call fraud shield right into the chassis of the experience. So these are things like the ability to put your debit card to sleep when you sleep. You can turn off all online transactions or you could just say, I only want to allow Amazon and walmart.com, no other online transactions. You can assign a loved one to be a fraud alerts copilot where if a new card is issued or your address is changed or a payee is added to bill pay, you're alerted. You can't, the person that you assign, which typically a family member, they can't move money, but they could just be aware because they may be more pervasively connected than you are. There's a whole set of features that I won't take you through all of them. More recently, I think the most exciting feature that we've launched is called speed bump. And this will sound a little bit counterintuitive because I've listened to your show and folks come on and talk about faster, faster, faster money movement. Right. It's like, it's like you could do a whole show on, you know, my way of moving money faster is better than your way and more scalable and, less costly and whatever. And what we said is, wait a second, does that always make sense? And what if you could use the speed of money movement via an eloquent, of like an elegant experience, slow money movement down and prevent fraud by doing so and not compromise the customer experience. And that's where the idea of SpeedBump came around. And what it is is that it's a set of pauses, alerts and education at the point of the transaction that are aimed to stop fraud and scams. I give you a couple of like pertinent examples there. 

So very typical example would be you know, the, the, the, the grandma scam and it's an imposter who texts and says, grandma, this is Kevin. This is my new number. I lost my phone. I lost my wallet. Don't tell anyone, send me some money. Right. And grandma's like, my gosh, okay, I'll send it to you. And then the money gets sent poof. It's gone. Right. now with SpeedBump what would happen for Charlie customer is because a new payee was added. Cause remember the new phone number that I just told grandma I had, and money movement occurred immediately after that. The money movement would be paused for six hours. During those six hours, our Charlie member would receive a text message and in-app notification email that summarizes the transaction, but it'll be coupled with contextualized education. So in this case, there'd be two components. One is that if you add any new payee, watch out for imposters. The best way to ensure that it's not an imposter is to make contact with that person through a channel other than the one that they initiated contact with you from. Right. But it will also tell them that fraudsters and scammers will prey on urgency. Right. Because we saw that, Hey, this number was added and then money moved real quick. Cause you know, the fraudster told grandma, um, I need this money right now. And it will tell them that urgency is something that they use. if they go, no, you know, I'm sure in six hours that ACH is going to go through, the experience is not really compromised because it would take a day or two anyways. But in other instances where it actually makes them stop and think, they might go, wait a second, let me call their house. Let me, you know, contact them through another mechanism and that the problem would be solved there, you know? And then if, as an example, you had a situation where we saw a login from a new device or a new location, the fraud education component in peace would be around the likelihood that a password is compromised. And here's how you check if it's compromised and what you do in the event that it's compromised. We have documented since we launched Speedbump over a million dollars of fraud that was prevented from our customers. And that's just what we've documented where we've talked to someone who experienced that. We expect that it will be more over time. But it is hard to find someone who hasn't been hit by this sort of thing. And they're getting more and more sophisticated in what AI does. And why, you again, we think that the banking space serving seniors is so important to anybody in banking or any organization is that they're getting attacked first. And AI, what it does is enables these things to happen at scale. Because before the way you scaled was, to have a cheaper call center with more people dialing. Right now with AI, you can write a prompt that says, hit all these people through these different channels in this way and of the subset that reply, do this. And then if they reply this way, do that, do this, do that. And then connect me over the phone with anyone who falls out of the other side into my call center with 10 people who now have. you know, pre-qualified people. And this is going on all the time. It's happening and I'm sure you see it in your text messages.

PR: Yeah, every single day, every single day I get some sort of fraud attempt and Coinbase is a real popular one. But the thing that I think has been really scary in the last year that we've seen is the phone call. I read about something recently where the granddaughter calls the grandparent. Now it's not the granddaughter, obviously, but it's her voice. It sounds exactly like her having a normal conversation with you and she's explaining what's happened. And the grandmother goes, my God, this is terrible. I'm sorry, Sophie. Well, I'll get you the money right away. Is that something that you're, I mean, I guess you have the six hour limit. It's just, that's…

KN: No, but we actually, here's how we think of that. Cause it's real, right? And that's only going to get worse over time. So for that one, in particular, I've also launched TikTok channel called Banking on Kevin, where I identify scams and fraud and explain them in really simple ways. And this is a place where a best practice in this case is one where you do consider having a code word with key family members that they share. It's kind of like a safe word that you have. And we created a guide actually that is a discussion guide for adult children to have with their parents around these sort of things that could happen. One of the examples is this one. I'll also add, and this is an area that this isn't launched yet, but it's on our roadmap for our fraud efforts. One of the things that we're doing is we're working on adding a safe code to every interaction inbound or outbound, right? Because part of the Coinbase calls, I get the Coinbase calls too, right? This is Coinbase, like we've frozen your account, da da da da da, right? And you don't know, but what will happen is that we will have an ongoing log on the site that will have every interaction with you, including a live one over the phone, and there'll be a safe code next to it that you could, if you've got a statement, you could reconcile the paper statement or letter against you got an email, you could reconcile it again after securely, you know, logging into the app. And I think we have to go in that direction and create these safe arenas because they're very clever in how they, you know, do this stuff. They'll call you and they'll say, you know, Peter, I'm calling from Bank of America. And they'll text you at the same time. So it'll feel like the system's going off because we've seen some suspicious activity on your account and this is call us back immediately. You know, we just want to make sure that this stuff is okay. You you call, right. And then they'll put you on the defensive at that moment. They'll say, Peter, as you can understand, this is very serious matter. Before I can move forward, I need to verify your identity so that we make sure that, you know, you're the, the fraudster is not in possession of your phone. Since we've called you on the number that we have on file. I'm going to go ahead and text you a code, a secure code, can you read that back to me? Now what the fraudster is doing during that period is they're resetting your password and it's triggering a code to reset the password, right? You're reading it to them, they're changing your password and then they'll read off the last three legitimate transactions to you and you'll feel like, thank you, you'll thank them, right? I'm saying it figuratively, you've probably been hit by these enough where you wouldn't fall for that, but. And you leave and you're like, great. thank you. And you know, they'll say, we're so sorry. You know, sometimes our systems are little trigger happy at Bank of America. They get the best of us, but thank you for your time, Mr. Renton and have a wonderful day. And off they are draining your account. And this is how it happens, which is why it's important to create a mechanism by which you have a means to know that the counterparty that you're talking to is actually who they claim to be. So it's…this is gonna go wild. And, know, it wasn't long ago where on the receiving end, they used voice to authenticate you as being the person, you know, now they got to, we've got to rethink all that because that's now a vulnerability. was a wall is now, you know, an open door.

PR: Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. Anyway, we're going over time, so maybe just last question. I'd love to kind of get a sense of what your vision is here, where you're going, and what would success look like for you in say three to five years?

KN: You bet. know, when I think about it is, you know, at end of the day, I want to have millions of older Americans served by Charlie in a manner where there, we help them get more for their money and keep it safe, you know, via an experience where they feel respected about it. And the way that I measure that, you know, of course we want to get to millions of customers, but more so than that and it's something that I'm really happy to say now after a couple of years in market, we're seeing a lot of is do they trust us enough to tell a friend to join her? You know, and, and if we help them get more for their money and keep it safe, then we'll earn not only their business, but, their, their friends and family members business. And that's my hope, for Charlie. And of course, from a product standpoint, there's no bounds to what we could do on the fraud front and in the areas of getting them more for their money. And a part of that eventually will be unlocking the hard-working accumulation that they've done in their home that they want to live in.

PR: Yeah. Okay. Well, I'll have to it there, Kevin. Really interesting hearing your story and what you're building here. think it's super important. More people should be focusing on this population. I'm sure you're glad they're not, but it really is.

KN: No. I can't bring…the more the better. I agree, it's a big space.

PR: Anyway, well, thanks so much for coming on the show today. See ya.

KN: Thank you very much for having me.

PR: I love some of the fraud innovations that Charlie has created. These are only going to become more important as AI dominates the landscape. But what I got from this conversation is how Kevin and his team really got to know their target market and then created not just features, but an overall design tailored for this market. Spend a couple of minutes on the Charlie website and you will see lots of little touches that you just don't see on most fintech sites. We are way overdue for a company like Charlie to achieve scale. I'm certainly rooting for them. 

Anyway, that's it for today's show. If you enjoy these episodes, please go ahead and subscribe, tell a friend, we'll leave a review. And thank you so much for listening.