We are truly living in unique times. The coronavirus pandemic has had an unprecedented impact on our lives and the entire global economy. Billions of people around the world are currently locked in their homes while businesses have come to a standstill and are in desperate need of a government bailout. Banks aren’t immune to this either, with a liquidity and credit crisis looming over the world economy.

We are now in a post-COVID19 era and this is our new reality.

The COVID19 pandemic has the potential to impact the collective human psyche to such an extent that we might have to rethink large parts of the global economy. At OnJuno, we care deeply about the world around us and how we can contribute to fundamentally reshaping the new world for the better, once we come out of this crisis.

Banking as an Essential Service

During this pandemic billions of people have suddenly realised that there are 2 kinds of businesses - essential and non-essential. We believe banking is one of the key essential businesses that makes people’s life easier and also more secure. The ongoing crisis gives a whole new meaning to storing money digitally; making everyday payments; getting instant loans; and having life insurance - things that were taken for granted. The crisis also raises pertinent questions around the nature of building an anti-fragile essential business and its ability to provide essential services to the public in such times.

With OnJuno, we are embarking on an important journey to create a new age cross-border Neo Banking Platform. A service that can be built with empathy for people’s needs and an anti-fragile business model which the public can rely on for their most essential banking needs.

A High Interest Checking Account

Prior to the ongoing crisis, the net interest margins of banks had peaked which meant banks were able to pay more to their customers on deposits – they were choosing not to. The interest rate banks have been paying on checking accounts has effectively been the same for the past 10 years. This timeline began when banks lowered interest rates to zero as a result of the 2008 financial crisis and learnt they did not lose customers. We think it’s high time banks start to pay customers a fair share of interest on deposits since that’s the bedrock on which the largest banks are built. Interest is now the new battleground and we are on your side.

We are excited to come out of stealth and give you early access to what we are working on. An API is a set of functions allowing the creation of our application that has access to features or data of another application or service.

For instance, we don’t hold your deposits with us, instead, we work with our banking parter to store your money safely. Similarly, we are building an ecosystem of partners powered by their APIs for automated KYC (Know Your Customer), issuing debit cards, initiating ACH transfers, sending international remittances, etc. Working with our partners also enables us to ship quickly, iterate rapidly and reduce overall costs for our customers. Our internal and external processes are also fully automated with best in class SaaS (Software as a Service) tools. This includes customer support, user analytics and research, notifications, product management, etc. Hence, we can react to changes much faster and completely personalise your experience based on your financial needs.

As a digital only banking platform we do not have the infrastructure and team cost of setting up branches and can pass on more savings to you. We are also a remote team (currently working from home) with offices in Singapore, Bangalore and soon to be in San Francisco. This distributed nature of our team helps us reduce costs further and understand customer needs across borders.

We think of ourselves as a Human API that brings empathy in the system for our customers.

In summary, OnJuno runs on APIs of its banking partners, fully automated with SaaS tools, built with empathy by a distributed and passionate team of people. We believe this model will withstand the test of time and is best suited to serve our customers.

We are also cognisant of the fact that we couldn’t have existed even a few years ago without the rapid innovation and explosion of services in banking infrastructure starting with Europe and now in the US. We are currently in 'the AWS phase of fintech' which is a unique time in history for the disruption in financial services.

We believe our customers and the public, in general, can't wait any longer and we are excited to cease this moment as we prepare for our beta launch. Our aim is to build OnJuno as a fully automated cross-border Neo Banking Platform that an advanced AI can run some day. We shall then just be its human APIs.

Stay safe and plan ahead!