How Flourish Cash is able to pay great rates


June 6, 2023

Estimated reading time: 3 minutes

 

Flourish Cash1 was designed to give customers access to a competitive interest rate and more FDIC insurance coverage through our Program Banks2 within our easy-to-use and highly-secure platform. Read on to learn more about how Flourish Cash works behind the scenes. 

How Flourish Cash Works

Understanding how the Flourish Cash program works at a high level is quite simple. Customers looking to earn a competitive rate on their cash reserves can deposit money into a Flourish Cash account. Flourish then sweeps these deposits into our FDIC-member Program Banks, with whom we’ve negotiated higher interest rates. We keep a portion of the spread as our revenue and pass along the vast majority of interest to our customers. Currently, Flourish Cash offers a top tier rate of 4.65% APY,3 which is 11x more than the national savings account average.4 Our variable rate tiers are subject to change at any time.

While the program is simple, many Americans are so used to earning nothing on their deposits that it can be surprising that Flourish Cash can pay such high rates.


Why banks frequently pay such low rates

Banks ultimately need deposits in order to support lending activity. In order to write new mortgages at 7% APY, auto loans at 9% APY, or offer credit cards at 15% APY, the bank may need to put in place a strategy to attract a certain amount of new deposits or retain existing deposits. For a typical brick-and-mortar bank, that might involve paying a competitive rate on deposits, but also may entail spending money on print or digital advertising, maintaining physical branches, staffing customer service teams, and more. Even for banks that pay low rates, it can be costly to raise deposits.

At the same time, banks simply aren’t incentivized to pay more. According to a Wall Street Journal analysis of S&P Global Market Intelligence data, the five largest U.S. banks by deposits – Bank of America, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase., U.S. Bank, and Wells Fargo – which collectively hold about half of all the money kept at U.S. commercial banks in savings and money market accounts, paid an average of 0.4% APY in interest during the third quarter of 2022. By keeping money in these low-interest paying accounts, savers missed out on $42 billion that they could have earned if the money had been in a high-yield savings account.5


Why our Program Banks are willing to pay such competitive rates

For banks looking to expand lending activity, rather than incur all the costs of attracting those deposits directly, banks can instead pay competitive rates in exchange for bulk, or “brokered,” deposits. Brokered deposits are nothing new; in fact, there are hundreds of billions of brokered deposits in the US today.

For our Program Banks, paying competitive rates in order to attract tens or hundreds of millions in deposits from Flourish, at times literally overnight, can be extremely attractive in comparison to the many costs required to attract deposits directly. Our Bank Partnerships team works directly with banks to understand their funding needs and strike mutually beneficial, floating rate contracts – typically based on benchmarks like the Federal Funds Effective Rate (EFFR) or Federal Funds Target rate (FFT). We prioritize long-term, stable bank partnerships and have worked with many of the banks in our program for years.

The end result: better yield for our clients through efficient access to the macro interest rate environment and increased FDIC coverage through our Program Banks.

 

About Flourish

Flourish builds technology that empowers financial advisors, improves financial lives and retirement outcomes, and delivers new and innovative investment options to advisors. Today, the Flourish platform is used by more than 550 wealth management firms representing more than $1.5 trillion in assets under management. Flourish is wholly-owned by MassMutual. For more information, visit www.flourish.com.

 

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Flourish is an online platform through which investors can access financial services and products. The services and products offered through Flourish are provided by different entities and are subject to different terms, investor protections and risks. Flourish Cash is offered by Flourish Financial LLC, a registered broker-dealer and FINRA member. Flourish Financial LLC is not a bank. Check the background of Flourish Financial LLC and its personnel on FINRA's BrokerCheck. Flourish Crypto is offered by Paxos Trust Company, LLC, a New York limited purpose trust company regulated by the New York Department of Financial Services that provides cryptocurrency custody and execution services for the Flourish Crypto accounts, and Flourish Digital Assets LLC, which is registered in New York as a commodity broker-dealer and provides website and other technology services and support for Flourish Crypto accounts. Flourish Financial LLC and Flourish Digital Assets LLC are affiliates, but are not affiliates of Paxos. Please review the Legal section of our website, and the disclosures provided with each Flourish service or product, for further information regarding each service and product. If you were introduced or invited to Flourish by a third-party investment adviser or other third party, whose name or logo may be shown above, please be aware that, unless otherwise disclosed to you, they are not affiliated with any Flourish entity. The role of the investment adviser or other firm that invited you to Flourish may vary between different Flourish services and products, as further described in the terms for each service or product. © 2023 Flourish. All rights reserved.

1 A Flourish Cash account is a brokerage account offered by Flourish Financial LLC. Flourish Financial LLC is not a bank. The cash balance in a Flourish Cash account will be swept from the brokerage account to deposit account(s) at one or more third-party banks that have agreed to accept deposits from customers of Flourish Financial LLC (Program Banks). The accounts at Program Banks will pay a variable rate of interest.

2 The cash balance in a Flourish Cash account that is swept to one or more Program Banks is eligible for FDIC insurance, subject to FDIC rules, including FDIC aggregate insurance coverage limits. FDIC insurance will not be provided until the funds arrive at the Program Bank. There are currently at least 6 Program Banks available to accept deposits for institutional Flourish Cash accounts (accounts for corporations, partnerships and other legal entities) and at least 6 Program Banks available to accept deposits for personal Flourish Cash accounts (individual, joint and revocable trust accounts), and we are not obligated to allocate customer funds across more than this number of Program Banks if there is a greater number of banks in the program. Customers are generally eligible for FDIC insurance coverage of $250,000 per customer, per Program Bank, for each account ownership category. Thus, institutional customers are eligible for up to $1,500,000 of FDIC insurance and personal customers are eligible for (i) up to $1,500,000 of FDIC insurance for either (A) an individual account or (B) an account for a revocable living trust in which one person is the only grantor, trustee and beneficiary of the trust ("Individual Revocable Trust Account") and (ii) up to $3,000,000 of FDIC insurance for either (A) a joint account with two owners or (B) an account for a revocable living trust in which the same two persons are each the only grantors, trustees and beneficiaries of the trust ("Joint Revocable Trust Account"). The total FDIC coverage for a two-person household is calculated assuming that each household member has an individual account and that both household members share a joint account. If the number of Program Banks decreases for a customer (either because a Program Bank is no longer participating in Flourish Cash, because a customer's cash is not eligible to be swept to a Program Bank based on criteria set by the Program Bank (which will be disclosed at account opening), or because a customer opts out of having their cash swept to a particular Program Bank), the amount of FDIC insurance for which the customer would be eligible through Flourish Cash would be lower. Typically, all of a customer's deposits at a Program Bank in the same ownership category (including deposits held outside Flourish Cash or held through multiple Flourish Cash accounts with the same ownership category) count toward the FDIC insurance limit for deposits at that Program Bank. Customers are responsible for monitoring whether they maintain deposits at a Program Bank outside of Flourish Cash and should consider opting out of having their cash swept to any such Program Bank to avoid exceeding FDIC insurance limits. Although Flourish Cash is offered through a brokerage account and cash held in brokerage accounts often has the benefit of SIPC protection, until such time as we offer securities products, customers likely will not have the benefit of SIPC protection for cash held in their Flourish Cash account. Further, SIPC protection is not available for any cash held at the Program Banks. Our current Program Banks can be found here. For additional information regarding FDIC coverage, visit https://fdic.gov/.

3 Flourish Cash currently has a tiered interest rate structure, as set forth in the rate tier summary. We deposit your cash first with one or more of the Program Banks in the tier with the highest interest rate, up to the maximum amount of deposits for that tier, and then continue depositing cash at Program Bank(s) in each successive tier until all cash has been deposited, subject to any Program Bank opt out elections you have made. Each annual percentage yield (APY) displayed here is effective as of 05/08/2023 and may change at any time. The rates of interest paid by the Program Bank(s) to Flourish Cash customers may be lower than the rate that could be earned by you opening a deposit account directly with such bank(s).

4 Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, National Deposit Rates: Savings [SNDR], retrieved from FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis; https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SNDR, 05/08/2023.

5 Rabouin, Dion. “The $42 Billion Question: Why Aren’t Americans Ditching Big Banks?”. The Wall Street Journal. December 8, 2022.