M1, the Finance Super App™, wanted to create the first-of-its-kind Owner’s Rewards Card, offering up to 10% cashback that customers can redeem directly into their investment portfolios.
M1, The Finance Super App™, helps people manage and grow their money with control and automation – for free. Having hit over $6 billion in assets under management, M1 empowers hundreds of thousands of self-directed investors to open accounts and improve their financial well-being through investing, digital checking, and portfolio lines of credit.
Investing is now mainstream, and thanks to free apps like M1, it’s available to people of all financial backgrounds. However, there had never been a credit card that would help people maximize their investments through passive spending–until M1 had an idea.
M1 wanted to create a credit card that would integrate with cardholders’ portfolios and help cardholders grow their wealth, long-term. The idea was to let cardholders earn cashback every time they spent money on the Owner’s Rewards Card at an eligible retailer they had invested in. For example, if a cardholder had invested in stock at Lululemon in an eligible M1 Invest account, and then spent $200 at Lululemon on their M1 card, that cardholder would earn 10% cashback (or $20) and then get to reinvest that back into their stock portfolio.
M1 wanted to ensure that the user experience would be seamless and fully integrated into their current Super App. As a one-stop-shop for all things consumer finance, M1 cardholders needed to be able to oversee their portfolios and manage their cards all in one place.
”Our vision has always been to give clients a single platform for all of their financial needs. Rather than launch a standalone credit card that earns the standard rewards, we wanted to launch a card that truly connected multiple facets of our offering. The Owner’s Rewards Card now connects M1 Invest and M1 Spend in a way that makes each one, and therefore the overall M1 experience, more valuable to our clients,” states Ben Reid, General Manager of M1 Spend.
MI was looking for partners who offered quick-to-market along with a high level of customizability and the capability to create the investor-focused rewards that they were looking for.
M1 chose Deserve’s consumer card platform because we could deliver all of the above and more. The consumer card platform is a digital-first, mobile-centric, and API-driven platform that helps industry innovators like M1 create completely custom, competitive, and scalable credit card programs. With customizable APIs, embedded user experience, unique underwriting, servicing, portfolio analytics, and end-to-end compliance, M1 was able to build a unique card for their brand.
M1 was able to integrate Deserve’s flexible APIs into their app and create a fully seamless, easy-to-use, cardholder experience. With the M1 app, cardholders can easily see how much cashback they can earn when spending with select brands, decide where and how to reinvest their cashback, and manage other essential card functions. And with the flexible underwriting engine, M1 created a custom underwriting configuration, designed to maximize approvals through deep-tested artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) models.
In October 2021, M1 and Deserve launched the Owner’s Rewards Card. With Deserve’s cloud-based consumer card platform, M1 was able to build a completely customized rewards program that was compatible with cardholders’ portfolios. Ben Reid from M1 comments, “...we were able to create and launch a native credit card perfectly designed for investors, in months.”
The M1 Owner’s Rewards Card program was built to deliver:
As the first of its kind, the M1 Owner’s Rewards Card is the only credit card on the market to help money-savvy customers maximize their portfolios and easily build their wealth. Upon launch, 90,000 M1 customers joined the waitlist, affirming M1’s mission to create a card their cardholders will be excited to use. Featured in Business Insider, CNBC, Forbes, Bankrate, and more, the Owner’s Rewards Card made a huge splash, lauded for its innovative rewards structure that empowers cardholders to think like owners.
Check out the Deserve website today to learn more about how your business can launch a credit card with Deserve’s credit card platform.