In this episode of the Secure Your Retirement Podcast, Radon and Murs discuss an exciting new partnership with Flourish Cash, a high-yield, FDIC-insured cash management account offering competitive rates and massive FDIC coverage. Special guest Ben Cruikshank from Flourish Cash joins the conversation to explain how this account can protect your savings while offering liquidity and great interest rates. Radon and Murs break down the benefits of Flourish Cash, its no-minimum balance requirement, and how it provides FDIC coverage up to $5 million per person. They also stress the importance of having a safe and efficient place to store excess cash, especially for those nearing or in retirement.

Listen in to learn about how Flourish Cash works, why it’s a game changer for cash management, and how it can provide you with more FDIC protection than a traditional savings account. Radon and Murs share their insights on how this partnership can simplify your savings strategy, keep your cash liquid, and help you earn competitive interest without any hidden fees.

In this episode, find out:

·      How Flourish Cash offers competitive interest rates and no minimum balance requirements.

·      Why Flourish Cash provides FDIC coverage up to $5 million per person.

·      The advantages of a cash management account for liquidity and safety.

·      How to integrate Flourish Cash into your overall financial strategy.

·      Ways Flourish Cash can simplify your cash management without sacrificing returns.

Tweetable Quotes:

·      "Flourish Cash offers high-yield savings with massive FDIC coverage and zero minimum balance – truly a game changer." – Radon Stancil

·      "This partnership is all about giving our clients a secure, liquid option for their savings with the best possible interest rates." – Murs Tariq

Resources:

If you are in or nearing retirement and you want to gain clarity on what questions you should be asking, learn what the biggest retirement myths are, and identify what you can do to achieve peace of mind for your retirement, get started today by requesting our complimentary video course, Four Steps to Secure Your Retirement!

To access the course, simply visit POMWealth.net/podcast.

Radon Stancil:

Welcome everyone to Secure Your Retirement podcast. Today we're talking about cash, and Murs and I, we have a lot of clients who they like to have a certain amount of money in the bank. They feel like that, and that varies all over the place. We might have one person who says, "Look, I want to keep $50,000 in a bank," and we got other folks that says, "No, I really need to have two, $300,000 in a bank." And then sometimes people have more short-term things like, so for example, they sold a house, they've now got 6 or 7 or 800 or 900 or even a million dollars in cash, and they go, "I'm going to do something else with it, but I'm not going to do it for another year, and I don't really want to invest this money and put it at risk, but I really want to have it liquid." And the problem that we run into then is, well then how do we get a good rate of return, A, B, how do we keep FDIC without having to go to five other banks.

So we have a partner that we've started working with here this year called Flourish, and we wanted to bring somebody on to help us understand this a little bit better. So we have Ben Cruikshank who is with us today. So first of all, Ben, thank you so much for coming on and talking with us and explaining to us a little bit more about Flourish as well as helping our clients and our listeners understand how this works.

Ben Cruikshank:

Absolutely. Thanks so much for having me. Really looking forward to the conversation.

Radon Stancil:

Go ahead, Murs.

Murs Tariq:

So I'll kick it off on the conversation. So Flourish, well, that's a name, right? And so what is Flourish? Obviously Radon just kind of mentioned it has to do with cash and it's a solution that we've partnered with, so cash rate of return, FDIC. But what is Flourish? What's the idea behind it? What problem are you guys solving?

Ben Cruikshank:

Sure. I'll start by saying Flourish itself is our company. We are a 90-person technology company based in New York City. We're also a wholly owned entity that's part of MassMutual, one of the largest and most stable financial institutions in the world, and really our mission is to build interesting financial products, interesting and valuable products for financial advisors and their clients. Our flagship product is something called Flourish Cash which is really designed to help advisors help their clients with the cash that is typically sitting in checking and savings accounts.

Flourish Cash, so I'll just dump in right what it is. It's a high-yield online cash management account, and specifically what I'd say is we are not a bank, but we partner with a network of underlying banks. The way Flourish Cash works is a customer of ours gives us a dollar, we turn right around and deposit that at a bank that we have a relationship with which could be a big name multinational, HSBC or Citibank, down to some smaller regional players, and we work with a network of over 25 banks today which helps us distribute cash across a wide range of underlying program banks.

We took that exact same model that's used, again, hundreds of millions, maybe, sorry, hundreds of billions, maybe trillions of dollars in the US financial system, we turned that into much more of a consumer-friendly, retail-like product that looks and feels more like an online savings account. It is not that, but in terms of a ease of use and how clients are going to think about it, really think of that online high-yield cash management account designed to give you a competitive rate, higher levels of FDIC insurance than a typical bank account, and all while keeping your funds fully insured through a large network of FDIC member program banks.

Radon Stancil:

Let's just talk about FDIC for a moment. For most people, they know that FDIC is basically $250,000 per person, and so a lot of times if I had a person who's wanting, let's say 500,000 in the bank, then they kind of say, "Well, I'm going to take roughly 250,000 and put it in two banks." Now I know based on the information we've got from you as your materials is that you say that you can do 5 million per person, 10 million for a joint account, and then 5 million again for a business account. So help us understand. Let's say that I did have $5 million in the bank and I for whatever reason want to keep it in the bank. Tell us how that works. I know you just described it. Walk us through what that looks like and then anybody can just take that down anywhere they want to after that.

Ben Cruikshank:

So let's jump back to the Flourish model. You give us a million dollars, what we're going to do is turn around and deposit those funds across multiple different banks in the back end. I'll just again stick with easy math. Maybe for you, we put that at four different banks in $250,000 increments and spread those funds out so that you're able to benefit from 250,000 FDIC insurance per bank. So in this case, 250 times four, your entire million dollar deposit remains FDIC insured with us. That all happens completely automatically on the back end. You as one of our clients are never directly interacting with the underlying banks. We handle all of the back and forth and mechanics of that. In practice, you're logging into a single online account, you see a million dollar balance. Behind the scenes, funds swept to four underlying program banks.

Murs Tariq:

Ben Cruikshank:

So ultimately, I would say I would almost describe those as those are the mechanics happening on the back end of us depositing funds of the underlying program banks, moving them around as needed, but you as a consumer are ultimately just thinking, "I have a relationship," in this case, our legal entity, Flourish Financial LLC, just like I might have one with Schwab or might have one with Fidelity. Similarly, I just see a line in my account that's cash sweep or bank sweep. I don't really think about the underlying program banks. I'm just getting one 1099 from Schwab. We have, from an operational perspective, nearly the exact same model and also the benefit of one easy login, even one that can provide significantly more FDIC insurance than a standard bank account.

Radon Stancil:

Okay. Let's talk a little bit about, I guess, the mechanics of this a little bit. So because this is the structure, first and foremost, if I open up this Flourish account, do I have a checking account with Flourish or do I have a debit card with Flourish? How does that work?

Ben Cruikshank:

No checking or savings, and what I'd always say is we're not trying to in any way replace anybody's primary checking relationships. You've probably got checking, credit cards, you've got an ATM, you're paying your mortgage. We don't want to disrupt that. Really, Flourish is designed to help you with the excess cash, like the things you don't need this month to pay your bills. Often the funds that are sitting in a savings account are the first place you're going to think about for where you going to fund your Flourish Cash account.

So coming back to the mechanics, the first thing I'd stress is Flourish is an invitation-only solution, and we only partner with financial advisors. So if you're listening to this and you're a client of these fine gentlemen, that's a great place to start. They can send you an invitation to Flourish. You cannot just sign up on your own. You get an invitation, you sign up in about five minutes or less, takes our average client around there to open their account. You're then going to go connect your Flourish Cash account with your existing checking and/or savings accounts.

We use Plaid, one of the most common aggregators in the industry, and really what that allows us to do is you can say, "Hey, I want to maintain, let's say, a certain balance in my Wells Fargo account, continue to pay my bills, live my life there, and then I'm going to hook that account up to Flourish so I can move funds back and forth and really use Flourish for my reserve or my excess savings," if you will. We can get into quite a lot of detail on how we facilitate transfers back and forth, but for simplicity I'll just say it's really easy. Most transfers are moving next day, sometimes the day after that. Try to be very, very transparent, support for ACH and wires and automated transfers and manual transfers. Any kind of standard way you're thinking money moves into or out of an online cash management account, we're likely going to support something pretty similar.

So again, mechanically, I now have a... let's say I was previously someone with $100,000 sitting in my Wells Fargo account earning probably zero or 0.01 or some astronomically small sum. Investors have missed out on hundreds of billions of dollars of interest income in the last few years by keeping money particularly at your big money center banks paying almost nothing. So let's say I'm someone coming to Flourish and I've got 100,000 in Wells. I now open my Flourish account, connect it to my Wells Fargo account, and maybe I decide I want to move $75,000 from Wells Fargo over to Flourish. That's just a couple of clicks of a button and $75,000 is sitting at Flourish earning a competitive rate. Maybe a week later I say, "Hey, I actually needed to pay some bills or live my life out of my account, that balance came down." It's as easy as, again, a couple of clicks or call our client support team and request funds back in the other direction.

So in that way, often used as a replacement for the cash that is sitting in savings accounts, although all too often that's people who just had way too much money in their checking account earning virtually nothing. Think of Flourish as your excess savings which could be your emergency fund, could be your sleep- at-night money. Your advisor has told you, "Hey, you should be good," and you're like, "I want to pad that number a little bit in cash." That's very common. Could be I'm saving for a short-term liability, like a home purchase or a tax refund, I just got a windfall, any number of those. It's not the day-to-day cash which you should keep in your checking. The everything else, that's going to be a great home for Flourish, knowing you can get it back and forth usually within a day.

Murs Tariq:

That's great. So here's how some of the conversations used to go before we started using Flourish. It was I'm sitting in the room with a client and they say, "Hey, I've got this money sitting in the bank. I want to keep it at the bank, but it's just not earning anything. What do I do?" And so we would pull up bankrate.com, NerdWallet, all these different websites that rate banks and say, "Okay, well, now do the research, find the bank you're comfortable with, and now play that bank game of moving things around to get the best rate." So now with Flourish, all we do is we say, "Hey, we've got a relationship that we partner with, and we'll invite you to this high-yield savings program, and the rates are the best that we've seen." So how is it that you're able to keep your rates as competitive? Is it because of the network of banks, whereas one bank is usually just one bank and they have what they have, but you guys have a whole network of banks that you work with? So how does that work?

Ben Cruikshank:

Yeah, on the rate side, it's a two-sided story. So on the one hand, maybe I'll zoom out and mentioned earlier we only work with financial advisors and their clients. We work with financial advisors at a pretty significant scale. We now partner with about 850 different RIAs or wealth management firms across the country, have about $6 billion in deposits, tens and tens of thousands of end clients in the platform, and we really work hard to build products and services and technology that works for advisors and their clients, and that really matters. We're not competing with our retail direct-to-consumer arm. We're always thinking how do we make lives better for financial advisors and their clients, and we're going to tailor our technology and our integrations and our customer support team. Everything top to bottom is really thinking about you and your clients first and foremost.

What that represents then is quite a large distribution opportunity I'll say, right? We can tap into 850 firms across the United States, affluent Americans in every single state, territory, industry. That's an incredibly attractive depositor base for banks. So on the one hand, I think, think about, we source deposits from a wide range of investors and financial advisors in a really strong resilient network which is really important to banks. They want to make sure their funding is really stable, really secure, and we can achieve that by offering something really amazing to financial advisors and their clients. That's one side of the equation.

On the other side of the equation, and to get a little bit more into the mechanics, banks, why do they hold deposits, this is a huge simplification, but it's generally because they want to write more loans. They don't make money on keeping your cash in an account. They make money on lending, and right now, I think we're all aware of where interest rates are. What the bank wants to do is go write more mortgages at 6 or 7%, more auto loans at 9, 10, 11%, more credit cards at 14, 15, 18%. But to support those loans which are very, very lucrative for banks, their regulators and the financial system is set up to basically say for every dollar of loans, you need to keep X dollars in deposits on the books. So that's really why banks want your deposits, to support their loan activities.

If you're a bank and let's say I want to go write a bunch more auto loans, but I don't quite have enough deposits on the books today, I need to go raise deposits. What do I do? And I think the model everyone here on this podcast would think about is what I'll call retail, brick and mortar. I need to pay a really attractive rate. I need to go send you 1,001 mailers that you throw out instantly as you get them, very expensive marketing initiatives. I need to staff bank tellers and customer support teams, and you've got internal operations. It's a very expensive proposition for banks to pull in deposits in order to go write that auto loan at 9%, 10%, whatever it might be. So that's one model, very, very common.

We tap into something that's called a broker deposit, and we don't really need to get into the mechanics other than say this is a part of business-to-business financial services that once again, I think 99% of people listening to this podcast will not have heard of and never really need to think about again. But let's just say there's another way that banks can get deposits which is working with an entity like us, a broker of deposits, and we can basically give them deposits in bulk. And so that bank, on the other hand, we just described this very complicated, I need to go marketing and sales and customer support and brick-and-mortar retail, that's one way. Or they can work with an entity like us and we'll just turn around and say, "We can put a hundred million dollars on your books tomorrow." Like in one transfer, in one fell swoop or fill up 500 million over the next couple of months, but in order to get that very, very, very efficient deposit source, you need to pay a really competitive rate into the program.

So again, simplifying a little bit, but if I'm a bank that wants to write more mortgage loans or more mortgages at 7%, let alone auto loans at 10, 11, maybe it makes sense to pay a company like Flourish 4.5, 5%, 5.5%, whatever rates are at the time you're actually listening to this. That can be a really efficient deposit source for them to go support more loan activity. Ultimately, we've taken this business-to-business financing mechanism and then we turn it on its head and made it into a really wonderful consumer product on the other end. You're benefiting from really competitive rates, knowing that our underlying program banks are also benefiting from your deposits, that they're supporting their lending activity, and quite a lot of stability in the way that we've designed the program.

Radon Stancil:

Excellent. So is there a relationship to, I don't know, what type of rates. So for example, I know that you guys right now, correct me if I'm... we're recording this, I'll just say this, in the 1st of October because rates can always change, but right now it's about 4.5%. That's what we're at right now.

Ben Cruikshank:

Yeah, that's exactly right.

Radon Stancil:

Yep. So the thing about that that I think's so cool is that there is no... I don't have to lock my money up. I'm completely liquid. I'm getting this rate without having to lock into a CD, and so to me, that's the big thing that I talk to clients about is even if you found another rate right now that was maybe a little bit better, which we're not really seeing that, but even if we were, it typically is going to be like a CD and you got to put it in there and well, do I need the money in a month or not, and I don't know if I want to lock it up in a CD, and this is like we're not doing that. This is completely liquid. Although, yes, the rate could change over the course of the next year, whereas with a CD I might lock that rate in for a year. But the rate though, I guess I'm trying to ask is from a confidence level, is there a way to compare what your rate you're trying to achieve as compared to the market overall?

Ben Cruikshank:

I would say our rate is very closely tied to actions of the Federal Reserve. So if the Fed goes up or down 0.25%, we're probably going to go up or down pretty close to 0.25%. What I will say is we don't play games with our rate. We don't have an artificially high teaser just to attract some deposits and then shut it down. When the Fed was raising rates over the last two years which has recently stopped, a lot of banks were very content to let the Fed go up and then they'd wait a couple of weeks or even a couple of months before they pass a higher rate onto their end clients. We don't do that. The Fed moves, we're probably emailing you within a day or two up or down and saying, "Here's the new rate," trying to be as transparent, as fair as we can. Sometimes that works for us. Sometimes that works against us.

Hopefully, what I'd always say to advisors and clients, we're not trying to be the highest rate in the industry. If you really want the highest, go back, as you were saying a minute ago, go back to bankrate.com. You're probably going to wind up opening a new bank account about every month, maybe every three, to capitalize on teasers, to capitalize on promotions, capitalize on some bank that just wants to raise deposits, and so they're going to have an artificially high rate for three weeks and then they shut it down. You will almost certainly be able to earn an extra 0.1, 0.2, 0.3, something like that, percent over time interest if you're willing to go through the mechanics of constantly opening new banks.

That's, from my experience, certainly not why most people work with financial advisors, right? You want your financial life to be simple. So when Flourish comes around and we're aiming for consistently competitive and we've built our entire program to just deliver hopefully what is a really great rate and is also kind of transparent and aligned and you know exactly where it stands and completely liquid and all those other benefits we've been talking about, if that sounds like a good fit for you, we'd love to have you on as a client.

Radon Stancil:

I've got one final question from me and then Murs has one. There's a cool feature that you guys have we haven't talked about, and maybe you can just hit on it. I'm going to set up the example. Let's say I got $500,000. I love to keep $50,000 in my checking account or at my local bank because I don't know why. I just want $50,000 there. There's no rhyme or reason. So I put 450,000 over in Flourish in that system so it's earning a better interest rate, and then I go and I spend $10,000 which takes me down to $40,000. You guys have a pretty cool feature to kind of keep me at 50. Can you just explain that real quick?

Ben Cruikshank:

Yeah, absolutely. Let me touch on that one and then maybe I can open it up after and talk about transfers in and out generally, just to get a little bit more color there. We built out a feature called SmartBalance that's designed with that exact problem in mind. I know I want to keep 50,000 in my checking account to pay my bills, live my life. Really anything above that can go sit in an account and earn a higher rate, don't need it that same day in my checking account, but if I go below that I want those funds replenished. That's exactly what SmartBalance is designed to do. SmartBalance allows you to set a target balance on one of your linked checking accounts. You could say, "I want to keep 50,000 in that account," and then every two weeks we're going to look at the balance of your account and if you're over 50, we can pull the excess over to Flourish. If you're under 50, we can replenish the account and bring you back up to that limit.

So I'd stress it's not a daily feature. We're not trying to be an overdraft protection type of solution here, but we are going to take a look every other week and move funds in or out to keep you at that limit. Really powerful feature, completely optional, but we have plenty of clients ranging from 18-year-olds who love automating and setting and forgetting, up to 90-some-odd-year-olds who work with their financial advisors and say, "50,000 is the right target for me to have sitting in my checking account," everything in between. I think really powerful for clients who like that feature.

I then build on that. We also have more standard recurring transfers, so that's I want to move a thousand dollars every Friday from A to B. So maybe that works for your paychecks or payroll or whatever it might be. Mentioned manual deposits, so I want to click a button and move funds. That's definitely going to be the majority of our transfers, support ACH which are free, and wires. One really cool thing that I'm really excited to announce is we just rolled out same-day ACH transfers, and what that allows our clients to do is withdraw funds generally from their first account back to a checking or saving account generally in a couple of hours. We can get more into the details there, but generally you're submitting a transfer before 3:00 pm Eastern, your funds are sitting back in your bank account by 6:00 pm that night, really makes just a complete game changer in terms of fund availability.

The final thing I'd stress is everything I just described as a transfer you're going to initiate from your Flourish account. We can also take transfers initiated from outside of our four walls. What are examples of that? Maybe you want to direct deposit your paycheck into Flourish. Maybe you do want to pay your mortgage bill or your credit card bill or your utility bill out of your Flourish account. So while we're not trying to replace checking accounts, plenty of clients who are with us for longer and longer do just naturally move more and more parts of their financial lives, hook it up to their Flourish Cash account, make sure that they're earning the most competitive rate they can on those balances.

Murs Tariq:

Well, that's great. I think in our last few minutes together here, Ben, if we could, we've spent a lot of time talking about the benefits and also it's also just geared towards, we've been more on the individual side or personal side of banking. What other types of accounts do you guys support? Because I know we have a vast array of listeners here.

Ben Cruikshank:

What you'll typically find, and I don't want to overgeneralize too much, but man, do business account offerings in America are you getting a rough deal. Rates tend to be extremely low. There tend to be huge restrictions on transfers and flexibility, like you're back in the world of paper applications and needing to call the teller just to move money in or out. So painting with a very broad brush there, but as competitive as we are on the personal side, we are lights-out competitive on the business side because you're earning the same great rate and have the same FDIC insurance coverage, in this case, $5 million FDIC insured for a business.

And so that's a really important part of our offering. We have plenty of advisors who work with just businesses themselves and might want to invite them, but again, the majority of those are just going to be, I've got a rental LLC or I'm a dentist, and so at the end of the day my personal wealth and my business wealth are pretty intermingled in a way. And so also having the ability to, as of today, October 2nd, earn 4.5%, keep $5 million FDIC insured in a really flexible, easy-to-use account is just incredibly, incredibly important and impactful, and we hear the stories every day. Those are the ones that tend to be, hey, my nonprofit which keeps a million dollars in cash reserves, we earned enough that we could send an extra student to the charter school or funded some new initiative. We love hearing those stories, really important part of what we do.

Radon Stancil:

Excellent. Well, hey, we thank you so much, Ben, for coming on and talking with us. This has been super helpful, and we know that our clients that have started using Flourish have been very, very happy with it. We're actually using it ourselves. So thank you very much for coming on and explaining this for us, and it's been great. Thank you so much.

Ben Cruikshank:

Really appreciate the time. This was wonderful, and for anybody listening who is a current or future Flourish client, really just thank you so much for your trust and partnership and really here to support any way we can.