The grand opening of Michael “Killer Mike”, activist and rapper, has been delayed a second time by the company.
Ryan Glover, Greenwood’s co-founder, told CNN Business in March that the Black-owned digital bank company was delayed to July because of high demand. The announcement of its website had been made in October. According to Greenwood leaders, the delay is due to ensuring that the digital platform can handle the anticipated influx of customers.
Greenwood Chief Marketing Officer David Tapscott stated that the company’s leadership now expects everyone on the waiting list to be able to open accounts by the end of the year. The platform will also be available to the public in early 2022.
The company’s leadership stopped buying ads asking users for their waitlist. They shifted their focus to providing services to existing customers.
Tapscott stated Wednesday that adding people to a waitlist only delays the time it takes us to complete it. Tapscott stated that the first thing we promise is to provide the best product to the market. We won’t rush this. We are confident that our customers will have enough faith in what we do to stay with us throughout this journey.
Glover in 2018 came up with the idea of Greenwood. In March, the company’s leaders stated that Glover could not have predicted the huge demand Greenwood would get following the murder of George Floyd in 2020 and the subsequent nationwide Black financial empowerment campaign.
Tapscott says that this movement prompted more than 500,000 people in the area to open Greenwood accounts before the company was officially launched.
Greenwood has recently appointed Dylan Herath, a fintech leader, to be its new VP of engineering. This will ensure that the company’s software can handle all customers and speed up the rollout. Herath spent the past four months as a technology partner at JPMorgan Chase. She helped to develop and bring to market products faster by executing strategy for the company’s small-business banking platform.
Herath worked for 11 years at FIS (FCUUF) as the director of engineering. She was responsible for the launch of FIS’s Digital One platform and led its global engineering team.
“Ryan [Glover] believed it was important for us to have a focused focus to reach the market quicker. CNN Business interviewed Herath to explain why she was hired.
Since Glover and Render shared their vision last fall, Greenwood has had strong allies in the financial sector. The company announced that it had raised almost $40 million from Series A investors, including JPMorgan Chase (JPM), Bank of America(BAC), and Trust Bank.
Tapscott stated that six of the seven biggest banks in the country participated in our Series A round. “We have not done any other rounds.”
The company’s name is derived from the former Greenwood District, Tulsa, Oklahoma. This was an early 20th-century Black business community, Black Wall Street before being destroyed by a White mob in the Tulsa Race Massacre in 1921. In May, survivors of the massacre and their families commemorated its 100th anniversary.
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