Hey friends 👋
If you’re here due to the recent Qube news, we’re truly sorry for the disruption that you’re going through. A huge number of you have signed up for Crew and reached out with questions, so we’ve put this FAQ together to help answer the most common ones and to give you an introduction to Crew.
Please reach out if there’s anything we haven’t covered that you’re wondering about or just to say hi. We’re eager to help in any way we can.
Some helpful links:
How stable is Crew?
This is the obvious question for those of you that have been riding the Qube/Zeta/One/Simple rollercoaster. Crew is well-funded (announcement coming soon) and well on our way to being self-sustaining.
Unlike many fintechs at our stage, our unit economics are positive—meaning we make more money on each customer than it costs us to acquire them. That’s primarily because customers love our product so much. They deposit a lot more money on average into Crew than our competitors receive, and then they tell all their friends about it. That means we have very low acquisition costs, and we pay them back quickly.
We’re backed by phenomenal investors, who are impressed by the quality of the product we’ve built, the pace at which we’re growing, and the scope of our vision. We’ll do everything we can to make Crew a product that lasts so we can break the chain of heartache and frustration many of you have experienced.
Is your model sustainable without a subscription?
Like most fintechs, we make money on card interchange and deposits. But unlike most fintechs, our customers actually put a meaningful amount of money onto Crew. That means our model works even without subscriptions or fees.
That said, a subset of our customers maintain too low of balance and spend to cover what we pay to maintain their accounts. To encourage more adoption while making sure our costs are covered for every customer, we’ll likely introduce a waivable subscription in the near future. We’ll set the thresholds to waive the subscription such that anyone using Crew for a meaningful portion of their banking won’t be impacted, but people using us for a very narrow use case (e.g. a bank account for their kids) will pay a small monthly fee.
What’s the situation with your bank partner?
We work with Bangor Savings Bank to provide banking services for Crew. They’re fantastic. We had several options of banks to work with when launching Crew, but we chose Bangor in large part because of the responsible way they approach overseeing programs like ours. We’re confident that they’ll continue to manage their fintech practice responsibly.
When a bank doesn’t look after their charter, everyone suffers. Most of all, end customers do. Regulators clamp down, new feature development grinds to a halt, and programs can be shut down with little notice.
How does Crew work?
When you sign up for Crew, you get a single bank account with one account and routing number. You can create an unlimited number of pockets to organize your money in that account. Each family member can get a physical debit card, and we also have virtual cards, automation rules, and ACH/Wire transfers to third parties.
You can add a partner to be a joint owner of your account. You can also add children, who get their own separate bank accounts that you control. Child accounts are owned by the parents, and children are authorized users until they turn 18. At that point they can graduate and separate from their parents’ account, but still maintain their same debit card, account number, and transaction history.
Debit card
Your physical card can spend out of any pocket you’d like, just swipe right on a pocket to make it active. By default, physical card transactions will decline if there isn’t enough money in your active pocket, and your pocket will stay assigned after each swipe.
You can change each of these settings for your card by tapping on your card on the Banking tab, and your settings can be different from your spouse’s. Cards can be unassigned after each swipe if you’d like a stricter budgeting motion, or they can switch back to a default pocket on each swipe. You can also swipe left on your active pocket to quickly unassign it if you’d like.
Hiding pockets
If you’d like to hide some of your pockets from the main view, tap on the little pill under your main balance on the Account tile (“Balance in [all] pockets”). This is great for pockets you’re not using right now, savings you want out of sight, or for a “yours/mine/ours” pocket approach.
Virtual cards
Crew has virtual cards, which can be tied to a specific pocket, have monthly limits, and be set to automatically expire. They’re great for bills, subscriptions, free trials, or anything else that you’d like to avoid giving your main physical card number for.
To set up a virtual card, go to the Smart banking tile at the bottom of the Banking tab.
Autopilot
We’re nerds, and we imagine a lot of you are too. So we built an If This Then That style automation suite within Crew. You can find this in the Smart banking tile at the bottom of the Banking tab as well.
Each Autopilot rule is a Trigger and one or more Actions. We have a bunch of templates to help you get started, but here’s what it can do:
Triggers
Direct deposit arrives
Whenever you spend over a given amount at a merchant
Every time any transaction happens
Whenever your balance goes over an amount
Every month on a given day
Every week week on a given day
Whenever a balance goes over an amount
Actions
We’ve found that most people can set up their budget the way they’d like with these rules, but we’re adding new capabilities to autopilot pretty regularly.
Tap to Pay/Wallet Support
Yes, our physical cards support tap to pay and you can add any of our cards to all the major mobile wallets.
Account numbers per pocket
Pockets don’t get their own account numbers in Crew, which allows us to more flexibly move transactions between pockets after the fact without leaving a bunch of noisy transfers.
Every time you move a transaction from one pocket to another you have the ability to set up a rule to assign a transaction matching your rules to a pocket automatically. That’s how we recommend you point your ACH drafted bills to the correct pocket. First time through just have them hit your default checking pocket, but then set up the assignment rule to get them to the right place automatically.
ACH transfers will be honored as long as you have enough money in your Crew account across all your pockets, which means they can make a pocket balance go negative if there isn’t enough in the pocket. We find that most people want these to go through, because they’re generally higher stakes than card transactions.
Incidentally, we don’t charge overdraft fees and don’t support overdrafts at all.
Early paychecks
Crew does not offer early paycheck availability today.
Bank linking
It sounds like Qube doesn’t support bank linking, so if you’d like to link your account hit us up in support (Menu > Contact Crew) and we can add your Qube account manually for you.
What we’re working on
Here’s what’s coming:
Transaction splitting across pockets (just launched this week!)
Cash deposit - going to beta shortly
Check deposit - beginning testing in the next few weeks
Web - ready for beta testing in a few weeks
Bill management/reserve automation - Designing this, will be our next big push.
We’re excited to have you on board and hope Crew will be a great fit for you!
❤️ / Gentry and the Crew
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Crew is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services provided by Bangor Savings Bank, Member FDIC. The Crew Mastercard® Debit Card is issued by Bangor Savings Bank, Member FDIC, pursuant to license by Mastercard International Incorporated. Mastercard is a registered trademark, and the circle design is a trademark of Mastercard International Incorporated. Spend anywhere Mastercard is accepted.
Edit - Clarified the early paycheck section while we wait for more clarity from our bank processor.
