Today, users of Las Vegas-based FinTech app banq can now invest in Bitcoin and Ethereum in multiple accounts. Users can create as many sub-accounts as they need for business or personal use and buy and sell crypto out of any or all of them.
The launch was designed to serve as a bridge between crypto and small businesses or individuals. The sub-account solution will allow users to separate their crypto investments for different goals, people, or entities, while still viewing their total worth across these accounts.
While banq follows apps such as Square, PayPal, or Venmo in launching crypto investing, other platforms do not support multiple accounts, which limits how much users can organize and customize their investing.
Banq’s users have been able to utilize the sub-account feature in various ways: like creating an account for their own investments, one to pass on to their children, one to share with a partner or spouse, or one for their business to invest a portion of their treasury into Bitcoin or Ether.
“Democratizing finance is a core tenant of the crypto community. It’s critical to us to provide access to crypto assets to both individuals and businesses in a way where people can actually manage their investments, both for themselves and their business, in a way that’s organized and easy to keep track of,” said banq’s Chief Technology Officer and resident Bitcoin enthusiast, Kevin Lehtiniitty.
The company’s goal is to improve the experience of finance by creating a powerful product where users can merge, organize, and customize transactions and accounts to their liking. Users would be able to keep their USD, bitcoin, savings, peer-to-peer payments, business accounts, and more within one platform.
Image Credits: banq (opens in a new window)
CEO of banq Scott Purcell said “This new world of payments—of money—is accelerating at a breathtaking pace. It’s amazing and utterly transformative, disrupting and evolving faster than anything in history. banq is moving toward a way to hold (custody), authenticate, exchange/convert between asset types, and instantly & frictionlessly settle between counter-parties, enabling an incredible new generation of payments.”
Typically, payment apps and crypto wallets are “single-bucket,” meaning all transactions live in one account. This has created confusion when tracking balances for different goals or people; it has made it next to impossible for small business owners to receive exposure to crypto assets in the name of their small businesses.
The company has no plans to stop at investing. Its mission is to make crypto understood, accessible, and useful to an expansive audience. Smoothing volatility and difficult barriers to entry into crypto is part of this mission, while incorporating the original benefits, like privacy. As cryptocurrency serves as a way to transact mostly anonymously, it was a natural addition into the product.
“We have adopted what we call a ‘Privacy by Choice’ philosophy, in that everyone can choose how they appear on banq. Users aren’t forced to share their personal information on the app—they choose their account names and appear however they want when transacting with others,” said co-founder and Head of Product Melissa Laci.
“We believe that everyone, regardless of industry, should be able to transact safely, efficiently, and freely, wherever they want, in whatever currency they choose, without fear of their accounts being blocked or frozen—as long as they are acting legally, of course,” Purcell remarked.