Yours Bank

2 min read
10 Aug 2023

Industry: edtech and fintech

We offer a digital credit account for teenagers that provides financial autonomy and education, allowing the new generation to enter the market as informed consumers while still giving parents the security to manage their child’s spending.

Founder Felipe Diesel started his career as an educator, eventually building up his own language school chain while working in São Paulo for an educational group focused on elementary and high school development. There, he realized how parents, especially fathers, had an almost exclusively financial role in their children’s education, and a distant one at that. He also noticed how underdeveloped these relationships with money were, being mostly thoughtless, small and entirely cash based. Most importantly, he saw how unprepared this system made children for the realities of the modern financial market and how it perpetuated a pattern of financial miseducation and dependency in younger generations.

— Photo by @rafadosvideos

Seeing this gap in the financial education of his students, he recruited his longtime friend Willian Santos to develop something better, and that was Yours Bank. Yours Bank is a credit-based, digital-focused bank account dedicated to underage consumers. The difference between Yours Bank’s approach and other minor or family bank accounts in the market is its educational approach. The app is uniquely designed to give new generations an early financial footprint while also teaching finance basics through gamified rewards and classes. Yours Bank’s unique approach to digital banking offers parents full control over the prepaid limit set every month. Still, unlike other traditional family banking options, Yours Bank gives its users full autonomy in the daily management of their accounts.

Felipe Diesel and Willian Santos were friends and educators for over fifteen years when they decided to found Yours Bank. Both are highly motivated by the need and desire for financial education within Brazilian families, especially among the new generation. This motivated them to move back to their home state of Rio Grande do Sul and start Yours Bank in pre pandemic 2020. So far, the team has grown with two more partners, Raphael Neves (CTO) and Lucas Perondi (CMO), as part of their executive team. 

With such intimate origins, the team still reflects the founders’ focus on education as its main driving force for change in the financial future of their community. Working between their town of Santa Rosa and the state capital Porto Alegre, the team is passionate about enacting change and have begun to implement that on a national scale with partnerships with Banco do Brasil and Visa.

— Photo by @rafadosvideos

Milestones

  • Launching beta testing for Yours Bank accounts and app in September 2020.
  • Officially launching Yours Bank app in March of 2021. 
  • Raising R$1.2 million (US$233,800) in the first round of preseed investment with Venture Aceleradora.
  • Receiving R$5 million ($US974,000) investment from BB Ventura in July 2022 for seed round. 
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