How Otomo App Is Disrupting Fintech and Personal Savings Plans

All right, this is Brad Costanzo. Got a really special treat for you today on this exclusive audio and video episode of Bacon Wrapped Business. And today I invited a guest on who has really impressed me with some of the technology and the story that he has brought to every single person we're going to talk about today. It's an app called Atomo. I've got it here on my phone. And it's not often that I stumble across a piece of technology that really makes me stop and think, wow, this is different, this is cool. And this is extremely useful. And this is one of those things that I can see myself using time and time again. And as I dove into this, I have continuously been impressed. This is a very exciting entrepreneur who is really set not to disrupt the financial industry, but who is disrupting the financial industry with some of his innovative, this very innovative application. And I reached out to him to get him to not only tell his story of what he's doing, how he's doing it, but also why he's doing it. And I also selfishly want to find out a lot more about this because I'm very fascinated with the fintech or for those of you uninitiated, the financial tech industry. It is a very exciting place to be. It's a very exciting place to play both as a entrepreneur and an investor. I happen to be both. And I really wanted to get down to the bottom of this about not only what is Atomo doing now, but what it planning on doing in the future. And I'm really excited for you to check this out. By the way, if any of you are listening and you can't make it to the end of the show, make sure you check out the show notes. If you're listening to this on itunes or just on the audio version, click on the link so you can come over and watch the video because I am going to have him do a demo of this, but you can also run over to Otomo O-T O M O APP.com, check it out for yourself, download it. It's a completely free app, so we'll get that plug out of the way just in case you don't have time to finish the entire episizzle here, but I wanted to welcome Keller Crawford to Bacon Wrapped Business. Thanks for ha. Thanks for showing up, Keller. I appreciate it.

You stole my line, man. Thanks for having me, Brad. Yeah, I'm stoked to, stoked to be here, stoked to talk about Atomo. And you know, I listen to your podcast. I'm a fan and so appreciate being here. So.

It's my pleasure, man. And as I said, what you've done really made me kind of stop and go. Huh? This is interesting. And I'm also the kind of guy who I downloaded probably most of the financial apps. I love automation, I love technology, I love staying on top of my finances, etc. But so that I don't. So that, you know, I may not do it justice, give us a brief overview of what is Atomo, and then we're going to dive into some of the details in a moment. But what is Atomo?

Atomo is a money management app that allows you to target income as it comes to into your account and decide which income goes where under different circumstances. So Atomo looks at different criteria that are important to you and essentially directs your money where you want it to go.

I love that. And that was one of the first things I noticed when I downloaded the app, is that you, you have the ability to set up what you call goal boards and different things. So, for instance, if I want to save for a vacation versus if I want to save to get out of debt, or if I want to pull money out, you know, 33% of my business income out into a sub account for taxes, I can do that very easy. And, you know, I've always been a big fan of the. It's an old app online, it still exists, but like, if this, then that. So if this happens, then you can do that. And automation just makes all of our lives easier. And I've used a lot of the other tools that are out there in the financial app space, and none of them seem to have quite the robust level of personalized choices that Atomo has. And I just started to play with it. The more I started to play with it, the more I realized just how infinite the number of things that I could do with it are, and yet how simple it is. And at the same time, what are some of the big problems you see that Atomo is solving from a macro perspective?

We're all experiencing. Actually, I don't know if we're all experiencing, but what our economy at large is doing quite well. But that's not felt in every household. In fact, the average net worth, I think I heard someone say the other day at one of these fintech conferences, was negative $10,000. And the cash on hand is no more encouraging. I believe the statistic is somewhere around 60% of people can't cover $1,000 expense if they get hit without borrowing from a friend.

I heard that that was a really famous, I think it was a CNN or money report that I think 40% of the people, if they got hit with a $500 expense, could not just go into their savings account going into debt. And that really is a scary view of what either half or even a majority of the population are facing on a day to day basis. So you're spot on with that. So that's one of the bigger problems. And then what else have you noticed?

One of the things that technologists look for when they're creating technologies is they look for a systemic problem. And so people have actually solved this need in households for extra income by creating opportunities like Uber, the ability to rent your driveway out.

Right. The entire gig economy.

Right, exactly right. The gig economy and the sharing economy, the freelance economy, all of these are a response to our ability to use technology to leverage latent resources. That's the good news. But along with the gig economy comes these associated problems. And one of those is that now if I'm a gig economy worker, I'm a freelancer, I don't have an HR department. I actually am a business of one. I've got to deal with my own taxes, I've got to deal with my own health care, and a lot of times I don't know where to go for answers. So when you look at my finances, I've got just as many dreams, I've got just as many outgoing payments and subscriptions. But now I have additional income streams to wrangle. And there is no financial technology that allows me to target individual income streams, direct them. Until now. That's really why we built Atomo to meet this emerging problem head on, a solution to money management.

In this time, what does Atomo do really, really well that some of the other solutions out there don't really do as well? Because you guys, you have some really cool innovations that I found that some of the other ones don't.

Yep. To make it really simple, it's the ability for us to target specific income streams and say these things are allowed to go into these buckets. I don't know. There's. There are a lot of different savings apps from acorns to digit to Capital and all of them have their mechanisms for automation. For a lot of people that have uncertain income automation like that, where there's technologies that are guessing how much is okay to save or are tying saving to something arbitrary like buying something at a store, which we're all doing, no matter how much money we have in the bank account, we're always buying things. There's a lack of fidelity between what you would in fact were doing if your only job was to decide how much you could save at any given moment or not. So these guessing apps are these arbitrary kind of apps that have little rules that aren't linked to the actual money coming in. They're creating sort of an anxiety there. Atomo takes that out, in fact, brings the automation into sync with you and your priorities.

I love that. Can we. Are you set up to do a screen share and give us a little quick tour of how easy this is? Because that's one of the things I love about it, is how simple it is. It's not. Doesn't take. I mean, it takes two minutes to master. I found. Would you be able to share your screen and give us a quick little demo?

Do that. Everything begins on Netoma with goal setting. So I set up some sample goals here. For us, it's really easy to set up a goal. You can easily upload images and put in some details. But for me, I guess we'll go ahead and do a demo today of paying off debt. For us at Atomo. It's. It's. If we're nudging anybody to start with anything, it's get out of debt before you start saving. Cause those credit cards and those interest rates can be overbearing. But once you have a goal here, it takes about 20, 30 seconds to create goals. Once you have them here, you can open those goals up by swiping. And when you're ready, you can swipe it all the way to the right and it opens this savings plan creator. You can see I name it here. If I want to change the name, I can select my funding account. And then I get in here to some of the first questions. When do I want to save? Is it once a week, once a month? Or do I want to save when I actually get paid? I like that option here. I can decide now which incomes should. Should actually trigger these savings. Is it anything that hits my bank account, including PayPal payments, Venmo rent checks from roommates. Maybe you don't have any of those and just want to catch all. Or you might want to target specific income that's coming into your account here. Paymation is where I make my money. So you can see I've got 19 deposits detected in six months. It's detecting my income and I'm just going to use that to drive this plan. So I have a very targeted plan now. Starting today, I'm going to save that $5,000 that I already set up. And I'm just going to save to get out of debt. I'm just going to save 8% of everything I make. And to make sure I'm safe, I'm going to say do this as long as I have 750 bucks in my account.

Right. And I think that's important because, like, you know, we're taking money that's coming into the. What would normally go into the normal checking account. Right. And we're going to send it over, we're going to segment it into a really. It's a sub account. And if that. I like that safety mechanism because if you are the type who runs pretty close to like, hey, I want to at least keep like $750 in my bank account, no matter what you're saying. Yeah, don't. Don't take it out. Don't save it if I'm running low. Only do it if it's above that. So I love that little kind of safety feature that you guys have added.

Yeah, yeah. You want to make at all cost. You want to avoid overdraft fees. Nobody likes those. And we engineered the system truly for peace of mind. And that's where this next feature really comes in handy, too. For people that want to try out the app and they're not sure about financial automation. You can actually, with Atomo, something that you can't do with. I haven't even seen this ever, is semi automation. So I can set this plan to run and do I want it to happen automatically. If I do, I hit yes. If not, I can review every transaction as it's being teed up. It'll tap me on the shoulder and say, hey, Cal, is it okay for us to pay off debt now?

So this is a summary here. The goal is to pay off debt from whichever funding account which you've identified here. Save whenever I get paid all deposits matching paymation. I know when I did this, for instance, I have a cousin of mine who pays me like $20 a month when I was first testing this out for his phone bill, because I pay for that. And I was just like, yes, take all the money from him and him only. And it was really easy to tag it as my cousin's name and says, yep, anytime he pays you, send it over to this sub account so I can save whatever I want.

Yeah, that's incredibly powerful. I mean, imagine being able to tag somebody's name who's sending you a Venmo payment and directing it somewhere. That's something that, when I was growing up I've never imagined that I would have that control over my money through technology. And now it's possible. So when I confirm this plan, we're going to go ahead and activate it. And now what you can see here is this plan has automated over to my plan section. So it's gone from my goal board and now it lives here on my plans. And it's got some additional features I can save manually for at any time. I can pause it if I ever need to, but I'll see my progress as this bar fills up and as my money saves into these sub accounts. You can see your sub accounts here on the Wallets page. And at any time withdraw or add money to that. That's.

That's the.

That's really the platform, man. Right.

You know, just to. As a side note, one of the other things I noticed is, you know, this is the savings feature, but you can also use this somewhat similar to a Venmo, but in like an automated way. Like if, if you owe a friend of yours $500, for instance, and you're like, well, listen, how about if I just. How about if I just you we both download a tomo and I will send you 15% of my all my income or 15% of everything I make on Uber to you automatically until I pay you off. Would you like that?

Right?

So it's a really cool way to also, like if people owe you money or you owe them to make sure that, you know, listen, can I borrow money? I will set up an automation that will ensure you get paid. I know I've got some friends who've borrowed money from me in the past and I've never seen it. And I always had to go back to them and say, man, where's that money? So this is kind of a cool way to avoid having to do that as well.

It's certainly a dignified way of settling up with friends where you can set it up, it happens in the background and you and your friend can see each other out while you're hanging out and know that it's actually dialed. It's totally handled. And that's just one of, like you were saying before, some of the infinite things that you can express here with this technology. Never make or take a loan again without setting up an Atomo plan. It takes care of both parties and makes it a non issue right now.

Where is this money at? For instance, if it's pulling money from the. Into a sub account, like a savings plan. Right. It's pulling it. It is pulling it out. Of my bank account or my Venmo account or something of that nature. Because I know for a fact that my cousin sends me the $20, it goes directly into my Chase account, and then when it hits that, Atomo ends up seeing it, and then it says, hey, would you like to confirm this and send this to this savings account over here on Atomo? Where is that money actually at?

Sure. So the money is actually kept. We have two major relationships with financial services companies that allow us to be in business at this stage. Which, number one, you were asking about custody. Where are these monies? Actually? Actually the buck stops at Veridian Credit Union in Iowa. And in between us and Viridian is Douala. Douala is a white label PayPal essentially. So we use their Rails to transfer money from Keller to Brad. And when that money flows into the OTOMO system, it's sitting in fact at Veridian Credit Union. So everything is as secure as it can be with bank grade technology and encryption end to end. The way that we connect to bank accounts and get bank data is through Plaid. A lot of people now are recognizing the name Plaid because Etoro, the crypto platform, everything from them to American Express and Venmo, all connect to banks via Plaid. And so we actually never, Atomo never has a record of your username or password for your bank. We do it all via these secure intermediaries.

That's great because I know that for a lot of people, especially the general public who isn't as familiar with the way this technology works, they're not giving you carte blanche access to their bank account. You can't go in, make changes, see everything that's in there, and just have like unfettered access. So a lot of people worry about, you know, how secure is this? How secure is giving a third party access? I know that's probably the number one just concern that people would get us. Do I really want to give somebody else access to my financial institution? So now you mentioned Plaid, but how do you. How are we really protected?

Yeah, we actually, our team, we have no power to initiate any money request. It's all 100%. All that Atomo does is give you remote access to control a Dwolla custody account. So you think about dwolla as a PayPal account and the white label or generic PayPal account that you've created when you registered for Atomo. We are a interface for you to control your money over there. And when you create plans and they're automating money, all that's doing all that. We are, we are in our essence, a financial scheduling company. What we do is we take your instructions, we evaluate them when you tell us to evaluate them. And if everything looks peachy, then we put your instructions through.

And.

We do not have what is in the financial industry called privity of possession. We can't take anybody's money and abscond to Jamaica with it. And that's one of the reasons that again, we have less compliance requirements on us by the law. But even still, we are in compliance because we take it really seriously that we're interfacing with people's livelihoods.

Yeah. As you should. Now, this is still new. This is still a new feature set. You didn't, you know, it's, it's been battle tested. It works great. But I know from some offline conversations you were saying that this is really as, as innovative and futuristic as it is now. The future looks even brighter. Where do you see the next evolution of Atomo going in? What feature sets? Because I know you've alluded to some of the ideas you've got and some of the things that are in the works.

Yeah. Well, right now Atomo is a third party that sits outside of your bank and helps you to organize money as you earn it. The real optimal implementation of Otomo is for Atomo to be your bank or for Atomo to be an intelligence layer that sits inside your bank. So the second that your earnings hit your bank account, they're self organizing that. You said it before, like Blade Runner era banking. Right. That's the stuff where if you were to take a time machine with Michael J. Fox and go walk into the bank and you talk about what accounts are available, this is what that looks like. These are accounts that are synced with the way that you think and are managing your money in a way that is quintessential. Quintessentially, characteristically, you. You have cloned the way that you think about saving for your daughter's college fund. You have cloned the way that you think about taking care of your mom financially while she's got some health stuff going on. These things are all running at simultaneously and independently tapping you on the shoulder when you want to be, when you want to approve something.

It's like artificial intelligence.

It's actually artificial intelligence is, is not quite what we've done. In fact, our team and. Well, actually I coined this term because I was been trying to explain and come up with terms, but they just don't exist yet. So the type of technology that this is is a Yi or a upi. Those stand for your intelligence or a user provisioned intelligence. So if you think about Atomo as a scaffolding, just raw potential, you come in and you put your intelligence into this platform and your intelligence now can go to work while you go play.

Well. And I like that even better because, quite honestly, artificial intelligence isn't near where it needs to be, to where I would trust a computer to just guess and hope that my money is being moved around and managed the way I'd want it to. So I like this extra layer of, yeah, I'm setting, I'm setting. I'm still setting the rules, I'm still in control of my money. And that's great. It's not AI, it's Yi, or even if it is AI, it's actual intelligence. But this is fantastic. Now, as you know, we've covered a lot of the ground as far as, you know, the big problem you're solving, how you're solving it, given an incredible demo, and really also the mission and why, which I think is amazing, as well as the future of where this is going. Tell me about right now, where, you know, you are as a company, because a new company, you know, with scrappy, you know, smart entrepreneur like you, is facing a big battle with some of the, you know, the entrenched leaders here. So are, you know, are you raising capital? Are you out there? You know, what are you doing in order to get growth?

Mm, yeah. I mean, right now we're watching users flooding in and getting every day, getting feedback of how people love the app and that. That definitely feels good. You know, after these years of toil. We're looking. We're looking. Yeah, absolutely. We are in a seed raise right now, taking meetings with accredited investors. We're also looking at working with some large incumbents. So, you know, that's when you're going. A lot of people talk about these disruptors coming in and going up against the banks and going up against these incumbents. We're really looking at cooperating with them. I'm not going to name any names, but we're in conversation with some pretty big entities right now and looking at incorporating in our roadmap, working very closely with some of the companies out there that are entrenched, manage billions and billions of dollars of wealth in order to give Otomo the best chance of reaching the people who can benefit from the value that we can bring.

So that's fantastic. So you're doing a seed round right now? Actually, I'm very Impressed that you've been able to create the technology that you've created so far without having already done a seed or a round or something in order to really fund this. So if this is what you've done, pretty much self funded, I really look forward to seeing what you can do with some real investor capital. Just speaking privately and personally. Well, not so privately, but personally, if you have the deal Docs, I would love to take a look at this and potentially explore an investment and see how I can be involved because I'm a big fan of the fintech space, I'm a big fan of the technology you've created. I like some of the things that you said, such as not even just necessarily competing with the big incumbents, but working with them and collaborating using some of your patented technology. Is that some stuff you'd be able to send me over? Love it. Yeah, I'll definitely take a look at that and we can connect offline about this. I really want to know how did this all start? Like what is your story? Did you just wake up one day and go I want to disrupt the financial industry?

Yeah, actually that's a bit of a story. It wasn't quite waking up one day, but it was absolutely an awakening.

Tell me about it. So.

This actually goes back to an accident that I was in, in Indonesia, in Bali, almost 10, just a little over 10 years ago. I had been in a head on collision at 2 o' clock in the morning in the rice paddies outside of Canggu and I. It was a hit and run and I was left there on the side of the road by myself looking up at the stars and I, I realized I couldn't stand up because my leg was broken and I'm looking up at the stars and actually feeling what it feels like to be in my last moment. And in that moment I accepted the fact that this was it for me. So that moment, that near death experience and actually kind of fading out toward that and then being picked up on the side of the road, taken to a hospital and then waking up the next morning to my surprise, to a flood of emails and support from friends and family, was incredibly humbling and also deeply transformative. I've always been in startups since my early 20s. I grew a company to multimillion dollar valuation and I've got track record of creating but I had always been driven from this perspective of what can I do next? I'm always tuned into to people. I don't think humanity could have a bigger fan. I'm a Big believer in the potential of people, what we can do together. And I'm always creating with that in mind. But before I was creating from a place of, in all honesty, kind of validation, like, what can I do? And after this experience, I think anybody that's had a near death experience like this, you just. All of that ego stuff, all that need for validation is just the last thing that's a priority for you. So I started. Really the big pivot for me in my core was a shift to asking this question, what needs to be created? What do people need right now? And so I started, you know, as I started getting back on my feet, I had intense brain trauma, I couldn't walk. And so for that next year I had my gears turning on this big problem. What needs to be created. Meanwhile, getting into an accident like that is very expensive. I couldn't work. I was just kind of cobbling living together. And so I was dealing with being in medical debt and having to ask for help from friends. And so I was looking at this problem of I was actually transported to this, out of this place where I was financially stable, where I'd always been an entrepreneur and always been more than provided for, to being in the situation where a lot of young professionals or people that are having financial hardship are. And so I'm now trying to reverse engineer in my subconscious financial stability and financial wellness out of this sort of like, how do people make that leap from nothing and hardship into stability and growth? And one day I literally did wake up and this entire app, I woke up at 3:30 in the morning and the entire app was there. It was just like a download. And I just bolt up, right? Just started writing the app in my notebook. And that was the seed.

You know what I love about this story? And it ties in specifically to a Facebook post I saw five days ago as you were talking. I just scrolled back through and it was a guest named Cleo Wade on Lewis Howe's School of Greatness podcast. And I remember seeing it because my friend Dan Martell shared it and it said, or she said on the show, if all your dreams came true, would they just change you or would they change the world? And I actually love that it makes me think of this where, you know, in the past you were just building like most of us do because we're trying to a survive. We want to make, we want to make living, we want to do cool stuff, we want to make good money and we want to have fun, et cetera. And that's really kind of a And there's nothing wrong with that, but it's a little bit more of a selfish dream. But I love the fact that you woke up and realized that I want to do something bigger. I actually want to change the world. I want to make a dent. I want to make sure that people are better off for having used something that you've spent so much time and energy and blood, sweat, tears and capital to create. So that's kind of the mission. I love that. What did you say? To reverse engineer financial stability and getting people out of poverty.

Yeah, that's it.

That's a big mission. And you've also told me offline that your mission is to create the Blade Runner era banking system the way that banks will run in the future, but to create that today and using some really efficient technology that works the way we think. Keller, this has been fantastic. I really love what you've built. I love the story and the why you've done this. And I think it's something that I know that I personally have started to use. I'm continuing to use it. I've been taking time to create my own little automations more so for my business. Like I'm at a place where I don't necessarily need to save for like a car, a house, a vacation, etc. Yeah, I'm fortunate enough to make enough money to where if I, if I want to do something like that, I just kind of write a check. But where I really like this is as a business owner, a small business owner myself who has different sources of income from whether it's consulting revenue or one of the other companies that I own paying me at different times, all, you know, all over the place. You know, one of the things I follow in my business, I try to follow as closely as possible, but it's hard to do it manually is this whole profit first methodology which I first heard about from a two time guest on my show named Mike Michalowicz, who really advocates for, as a business owner taking, you know, scraping, you know, profit off the top as well, you know, into a sub account and then taxes into a sub account and then payroll into a sub account so that you know, you're left with, you know, you're left, what's left over is how much you get to spend in your business. And you know, his mission, like, and I'll even link to this in the show notes, is to cure entrepreneurial poverty, which is this whole mismanagement of money. And I love the fact that not only can this be used for people who are just trying to kind of get back to even or to save money for things that are really important to them. But it can be used by business owners to really automate a lot of the, you know, complicated processes that they need to automate.

So imagine an Airbnb property owner, right?

Yeah.

Every time you get a payout from Airbnb, you can trigger a $150 payment to your property management company. They clean the place and they. And they. And maybe they're doing some administration on the actual Airbnb site, maybe responding to customer service. And so then you're taking the rest of the proceeds and you're going 20, 30% of that goes into a tax bucket, and then the rest goes to buy a new Airbnb property. You've now got a. You've just automated that Airbnb business, and that can just continue to spawn new Airbnb properties while you're off doing whatever else.

Absolutely. Absolutely. And I love it. So to all of my listeners, go to atomoapp.com to check it out. If anybody else wants to get ahold of you, maybe they, like me, are an accredited investor and would like to just take a look at the deal docs or just explore that. Is there a way that they can kind of get a hold of you after listening or watching this show?

Yeah. Keller at atomoapp, spell my name. K H E L L A R attach OTOMO O T O M O app app dot com.

Great. And that'll be. That'll be in the show notes. And everybody else, just go to otomoapp.com download it. It is absolutely free. There are no fees to get in there to play around with this. And I suggest you get in, just do one transaction, if nothing else, or not really a transaction, but set up one automation rule just to see how smooth and easy this works and then play with it like I did, to just think, what are all the ways that I can kind of get creat and, you know, saving, moving my money around, etc. Keller, I wish you the absolute best of luck, and I 100% look forward to diving deeper into what you're doing. And if there's a way that I can be involved as well, I'm looking forward to exploring that opportunity.

We'd love to have you. Thanks for having me on the show. It's been an absolute pleasure, man.

Thank you. And for everybody else, if you like this episode, let me know if there are. If you're watching this on YouTube or on the. On the site, if you want to leave some comments, you can always email me@bradaconrappedbusiness.com and if you love the show, make sure to subscribe and leave a review. I read every single one of them and it helps other people find and understand why this show has been so popular for the past five years. Thank you very much and I'll see you on the next episizle.