Evergreen Money introduced a high-yield checking account that offers the functionality of a traditional checking account.
Deposits in the new Liquid Treasuries account are automatically swept to invest in U.S. Treasury Bills, the company said in a Tuesday (June 25) press release.
The account earns a rate higher than most high-yield savings accounts, according to the release. As of June 20, the account earns a 5.31% yield. The yield may change at any time.
In addition to earning interest, the account offers users a debit card, ATM access, ACH payments, direct deposits and wire transfers, the release said.
The service has a single, all-inclusive fee of 0.03% per month, per the release.
Liquid Treasuries provides account holders with interest that they would lose by keeping their deposits in a traditional checking account, Bill Harris, founder of Evergreen Money, said in the release.
“Evergreen fixes this exasperating problem, which costs consumers 10 times as much as overdraft fees,” Harris said.
The introduction of Liquid Treasuries also marks the launch of Evergreen Money, which is a digital wealth advisor founded by Harris, per the release. Harris is a former CEO of Intuit, a former CEO of PayPal and the founder of Personal Capital.
Building upon his experience in investing, tax and tech, Evergreen Money is a Securities and Exchange Commission-registered investment advisor “dedicated to bringing innovation to the world of asset management,” the release said.
Cash in the Evergreen Checking Account is FDIC-insured through the company’s partner bank, Coastal Community Bank, while the Treasury bills are held in the user’s Securities Investor Protection Corporation (SIPC)-insured brokerage account with Treasury bill innovation platform Jiko Securities, per the release.
A checking account introduced in May by HSBC Bank USA — this one for business clients — combines an earnings credit rate (ECR) with credit interest.
The HSBC Hybrid Checking Account earns interest on every dollar deposited into the account. Unused credits are not forfeited, as they are with traditional ECR accounts; instead, this account provides businesses with both earnings credit and credit interest on remaining balances.
The product is designed to maximize yield, lower costs and reduce the need for multiple accounts.
Agentic artificial intelligence (AI) promises to improve operational efficiencies and the customer experience offered by enterprises.
The advanced technology is finding applications in loan underwriting and fraud detection, and now it’s moving across borders.
TerraPay Co-Founder and Chief Operating Officer Ram Sundaram told PYMNTS as part of the “What’s Next in Payments” series focused on exploring AI’s use in banking and by FinTechs that automated decision making and streamlined processes will continue to transform global money movement, especially as faster payments gain ground in cross-border transactions. That’s the inexorable trend, but as Sundaram put it, there’s still room, and a necessity, to have some human interaction in the mix.
In terms of global fund flows, TerraPay’s single connection ties more than 3.7 billion mobile wallets together across 200 sending and 144 receiving countries, touching 7.5 billion bank accounts. As one might imagine, coordinating and enabling the transactions is complex.
“Obviously, in the best-case scenario, everything goes smoothly, but when things are not going smoothly, that’s when the customer queries come in,” Sundaram said.
It’s no easy task to find out straight away where a transaction is, as analysts and representatives at the company have to look at logs and query partner systems.
“A lot of that work is done manually,” said Sundaram, who added that the agents “know the corridors and the markets that they are working in, but it still takes some time.”
TerraPay is using AI models with machine learning to bolster customer support and automate tasks as financial institutions (TerraPay’s client base) send payments in real time, and those payments are processed into local markets’ beneficiary banks.
“We still don’t trust [AI models] to let them respond to the customer straight away, but we can do the analysis, and then that gets reviewed by an agent who decides if [information] is accurate or not and then sends it off,” Sundaram said.
The same principles are guiding AI models and company practices to improve technical and security operations, analyzing and categorizing anomalous transactions and automating integrations with partner firms.
“Compliance is an issue where there is a lot of review needed of the alerts, and we are using [AI models] to speed up those processes,” Sundaram said.
Asked by PYMNTS about how agentic AI can be harnessed, he said: “In financial services, you can’t take chances on technology like this, which has the freedom to go wrong. You have to be careful about making sure that it’s 100% reliable before we can let things run entirely by automation.”
Agentic AI also remains pricey. For example, OpenAI is charging $20,000 a month for its specialized agents. However, Sundaram said the industry will become commoditized quickly, which will lower prices, and some open-source offerings are capable.
“There’s a fire hose of news about breakthroughs and new ideas and new ways of doing things that are coming out on a daily basis,” he said.
Data underpins it all, and Sundaram told PYMNTS that no matter what the application, the information fed into the models must be clean. Most organizations have a range of data sitting in different intra-company silos, and those silos need to come down.
In addition, the data must be structured so that it is accessible and can be synthesized by the models. Many firms may have more than 1,000 software-as-a-service (SaaS) resources to which they are subscribed but are not accurately tracked or monitored.
“Every database is separated, each one sitting somewhere else,” he said.
The days of stitching together those separate SaaS offerings to run an enterprise are ending, he said, and we’re headed to a future when data is collected in one place.
AI models and agentic AI “are extensions of what we’ve always valued at TerraPay, which means building the most efficient infrastructure possible in order to make sure that transactions are processed safely, quickly and affordably,” Sundaram told PYMNTS. “We see AI and [AI models] as powerful tools that help us scale all this very quickly while making sure we build more and more efficiency into the system.”
