Vic Chala, he is the CEO and co-founder at Symphony, a FinTech savings app that goes about things in kind of a unique way.
Really grateful for your time.
Thanks for joining us.
Yeah, I appreciate you having me. to be here.
So there's a lot of apps out there.
You, you know the space way better than I do.
They gamify spending, kind of encourage risk for the user.
I know you guys are trying to do something a little bit different.
Give us a bit of an introduction to how it works for anyone otherwise a bit unfamiliar, Vic.
Yeah, definitely.
So we're a savings app, one of the first savings apps, um, which gives you points and miles on your savings.
So think about credit card points basically, what you get just by saving money instead of spending money.
Um, so we give a 5% APY to the user, and you can get all these points, whether it's some cash or points or a mix of both, and you can transfer them to the biggest airlines and hotels around the entire world.
Similar to a credit card, but just by saving money.
And in terms of saving, it's like it's comparable to like a saving account or something I have.
In other words, instead of spending it and getting those AME points, I just kind of need to keep the money where it is and your reward.
That's, yeah, I think of it like a high yield savings account, um, but we give you points instead of cash.
How would you say this incentivizes smarter habits?
Yeah, so in a long, a big way, like, we've noticed signs like traditional finance and just the whole consumer financial world right now.
We're getting aggressively pushed like prediction markets, gambling, and it's grown like crazy.
Like over the last 3 years, sports banks increased by 300%, and we want to find another exciting way for people to like feel incentivized.
To do healthier financial behaviors and that's where we want to make savings more exciting, gamify with points and miles and things like that.
It sounds like you're trying to gamify the right parts of the equation.
You mentioned travel points.
Why is that a priority and any other sort of reward structure in terms of real-time feedback from your users that at least you're considering to offer them.
No, so I mean, right now, especially with points, you get some of the craziest redemption rates.
For example, you can fly to Japan from New York with 100,000 points, right?
First class.
Um, that will usually cost you $10,000 plus dollars, but it's only 1000 points or 100,000 points, which is not, but that takes like $15,000 of deposits inside scimit to earn that many points in the long run.
So, we're, you know, we're thinking about like Starbucks, you know, Netflix, Uber, things like that in the long run, and especially real-life experiences.
I think that's gonna be Exciting for the younger generation, like things you can't buy, right, like backstage tickets to concerts and things like that.
But at the get-go, the craziest redemption offers are at hotels and airlines.
You said 100,000 points first class in Japan.
Yeah, booking my flight right after the show today.
Um, you got a lot of early adopters.
Talk to me a bit more about user feedback.
What are a lot of those points of consideration they are coming back to you with and how is the process looking for you at the team to take what they're giving you and still try and stay active to implement them as you go along.
Yeah, so a big user feedback we've known so far is that I guess a big interesting proof point is that a lot of our users are actually women, which is really rare for a financial app.
About 40% of our users, day one have been women who want to use this primarily, and we noticed that especially later on in life, apparently women book most of the travel for the families, and they love points.
Points and miles is like their big thing, so that's been exciting to see.
Um, along with that, we're about almost 1500 users now in just a month, almost a million dollars in deposits in, in just a month as well, and the growth rate's been exciting, right?
About three weeks ago we were one third that level, so it's been just growing like crazy organically, mainly.
Dude, congratulations on the organic growth and growth otherwise.
Really grateful to have you.
Thanks for being here for having us, Nick Chava, CEO and co-founder over at Symphony.
