Does the world need another new banking service and app? Perhaps. A recently founded company, One, rolled out its eponymous banking app on Tuesday; it is available as a free download in Apple App Store and within Alphabet's Google Play.
"This is just the start of our journey to reinvent banking for middle class families and change financial services and fintech for good," One's CEO Brian Hamilton wrote in a LinkedIn post on Tuesday.
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A veteran of both small and large companies in the sector, Hamilton served as a senior vice president at Capital One (COF 3.55%) for just over two years. He founded One with another long-serving finance sector executive, Bill Harris, former CEO of both PayPal (PYPL -1.83%) and Intuit.
The One app offers a slate of traditional banking services, much like many rivals, but it also includes some things that its creators say are novel. Arguably the most intriguing of these are the service's "pockets," which allow more than one customer to contribute to and draw from pools of collectively held funds. The idea behind these is to mitigate the bureaucracy and effort involved in setting up and managing series of joint banking accounts.
One's accounts also feature an automatic line of credit that is triggered by overdrafts. Users have until the end of the calendar month to repay the overdrawn amount or amounts without incurring interest.
In spite of the founders' pedigrees, neither Capital One nor PayPal appears to be involved in either the One app or company. One's services are delivered by Coastal Community Bank, a local lender based in Washington state.
One has not disclosed the number of users of the app, nor has it divulged its number of accounts. Hamilton said in an interview with American Banker that it has signed up "tens of thousands" of clients.
