When Rob Curtis ran Gaydar back in 2018, he would sit in the chat room and watch the enthusiasts hopefully talk. “It was a dating site, but they asked for help finding doctors, accountants, trying to navigate the complexities of dating. LGBTQ + in a world that was not designed for us,” he said. Fast forward three years and Curtis is trying to answer some of those questions with Daylight—A New York-based neobank startup, built for the LGBTQ+ community by three “young gay men, to address the issues we lived through.”
For example, Daylight offers a debit card with your chosen name, no matter what your ID says. Plus features like Walk the Walk, an analytics tool that ranks toilet companies by their gender, using the pronouns and causes that owners favor in the monthly report , which tells Daylight customers how much they’ve spent at stores that are rated as not LGBTQ+ friendly. “This isn’t about a cancellation culture,” says Curtis. “It provides more transparency to a large economic bloc that cares who appears legitimately.”
Financial Queer is not an easy sale. “It was a real challenge to convince investors that LGBTQ+ people had specific financial needs and we could build a large, profitable business out of that,” says Curtis. They presented the idea nearly 100 times, “learning to tell our story better each time.” By June 2021, when they convinced Kapor Capital and Precursor Ventures to lead a $5 million seed round, they had an alliance of backers: exotic angel investors, institutional investors. fintech financial institution, Citibank’s Impact fund. Thousands of LGBTQ+ people are on Daylight’s waiting list ahead of its pre-Christmas launch in the US.
“You can’t provide great service to LGBTQ+ people just by putting rainbow labels on everything,” said Paul Barnes-Hoggett, co-founder and technical director. “You need to understand our unique needs.” Like “the pain, as a gay man, of walking into the bank and being asked ‘What does your wife do?'”, he said. Designed by LGBTQ+ folks, a big part of what Daylight sells to customers is relief: Barnes-Hoggett says “violation, intentional or not,” won’t happen with Daylight.
Community related content is part of that agreement. Members can share fertility goals and treatment success, along with advice on funding. “Personalization is central to our vision for the future,” says Barnes-Hoggett, which is increasingly in demand across banking services, products and pricing. Barnes-Hoggett learned this at Alice Financial, a startup he co-founded in 2014; US employers connect the app to payroll, employees connect their debit cards, and Alice identifies potentially eligible expenses, such as childcare, to reduce income taxable employees and save them money on income tax returns. The platform works for some of America’s lowest-paid people in $1 an hour increments. “Many people were on the line,” says Barnes-Hoggett. “We have one rule: Don’t mess with someone’s paycheck. Because my life was at stake, I learned to do the basics right. ”
Suffering is also overcome. medium, LGBTQ+ people earn less, frequently live in poverty, and save less in pensions, with women of color and transgender people earning significantly less than the national average. LGBTQ+. Billie Simmons, co-founder and chief executive officer of Daylight, said big banks treat LGBTQ+ people “like a monolithic group” when they need the right financial advice. “There’s a pervasive idea of gay people having disposable income — ‘two incomes, no kids,’” says Simmons. “Certainly, two white gay men, with transsexual orientation, might find themselves in this situation in San Francisco or New York, where it’s easier to be LGBTQ+, but that’s not common.” When loans for hormone therapy or HIV treatment are denied, many people have no idea where to go except for an expensive high-interest credit card to fill the void.
