ASPIRATION

Andrei Cherny was a former Clinton White House speechwriter, Al Gore advisor, and financial crimes prosecutor. He wasn't a typical fintech founder.

His thesis was that younger Americans, especially millennials, wanted their money to align with their values. They didn't want their bank using their deposits to fund oil drilling.

Aspiration launched in 2013 with a simple checking account that guaranteed your deposits wouldn't fund fossil fuels. The "pay what is fair" model was unusual: no mandatory fees, just a suggested tip.

This generated enormous press coverage and viral social media attention. The marketing was world-class.

Every communication hammered home the message: your bank funds bad things, we don't.

The sustainability features kept stacking. Plant Your Change planted trees.

The Aspiration Impact Measurement score rated how socially conscious your spending was. The marketing machine turned banking into an identity statement.

At peak hype, Aspiration was adding hundreds of thousands of accounts per quarter.

Aspiration offers a "pay what is fair" banking model. Customers can choose to pay nothing or a monthly tip of their choosing for the Aspiration Spend & Save account.

The premium Aspiration Plus account costs $7.99/month and offers higher interest rates and additional features. The company earns revenue from interchange fees on debit card transactions and interest on deposits.

The sustainability angle is the differentiator. Aspiration promises that deposits aren't used to fund fossil fuel companies.

The Plant Your Change feature rounds up every purchase to the nearest dollar and uses the spare change to plant trees. The Aspiration Zero credit card claims to offset the carbon footprint of every purchase.

The company also offers impact investing through the Aspiration Redwood Fund. Revenue also comes from their corporate sustainability product, which helps businesses measure and offset their carbon footprint.

Aspiration Spend & Save account with a pay-what-is-fair fee model. Deposits are guaranteed not to fund fossil fuel exploration, production, or transportation.

Plant Your Change rounds up purchases and plants trees (over 100 million trees planted to date, according to the company).

Aspiration Plus is the premium tier ($7.99/month) with up to 5% APY on savings and 1% cashback on purchases from socially conscious companies. The Aspiration Zero credit card claims to plant enough trees to offset the carbon footprint of every purchase.

The Aspiration Impact Measurement (AIM) score rates how socially responsible your spending is. On the B2B side, Aspiration offers corporate sustainability measurement and carbon offset tools for businesses looking to reduce their environmental footprint.

Aspiration is pivoting toward corporate sustainability services. The Aspiration Zero platform helps businesses measure, reduce, and offset their carbon emissions.

This B2B play potentially has better margins and more defensible revenue than consumer banking.

The consumer banking product continues but with more focus on premium subscriptions and engagement features. Aspiration is betting that the growing ESG movement will push more consumers to choose values-aligned financial products.

Partnerships with climate-focused organizations and companies provide distribution. The company is also exploring international expansion, particularly in European markets where climate consciousness in financial services is more mainstream.

The SPAC deal collapse was devastating. Aspiration announced a merger with InterPrivate II in 2021 that would take the company public at a $2.3 billion valuation.

By 2023, the deal fell apart amid deteriorating market conditions for SPACs and questions about Aspiration's financial performance. The company had to find alternative funding paths.

More fundamentally, the "green banking" model has been questioned. Investigations revealed that some of Aspiration's sustainability claims were difficult to verify.

The tree-planting program's actual impact was scrutinized. And the core banking economics were challenging: when you exclude fossil fuel investments from your deposit portfolio, you're excluding one of the most profitable lending categories.

Being ethical and being profitable pulled in different directions.

Aspiration attracted celebrity money and impact investors. Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert Downey Jr., Orlando Bloom, and Drake all invested or promoted the brand.

Institutional backers included UBS, Alpha Edison, and Valar Ventures (Peter Thiel's fund). The company announced a SPAC merger with InterPrivate II VSM Tec in 2021 at a $2.3 billion valuation, but the deal ultimately collapsed in 2023.

The celebrity investor list was brilliant for marketing but didn't prevent the business challenges that followed.