Breef raised $3.5 million in funding to continue developing what it boasts as “the world’s first online marketplace” for transactions between brands and agencies.

Greycroft led the round and was joined by Rackhouse Ventures, The House Fund, John and Helen McBain, Lance Armstrong and 640 Oxford Ventures. Including the new round, the New York and Colorado-based company has brought in total funding of $4.5 million since its inception in 2019 by husband-and-wife co-founders George Raptis and Emily Bibb.

Bibb’s background is in digital marketing and brand building at companies like PopSugar, VSCO and S’well, while Raptis was on the founding team at fintech company Credible.com.

Both said they experienced challenges in finding agencies, which traditionally involved asking for referrals and then making a bunch of calls. There were also times when their companies would be in high demand for talent, but didn’t necessarily need a full-time employee to achieve the goal or project milestone.

While the concept of outsourcing is not new, Breef’s differentiator is its ability to manage complex projects: a traditional individual freelance project is less than $1,000 and takes a week or less. Instead, the company is working with team-based projects that average $25,000 with a length of engagement of about six months, Raptis said.

Breef’s platform is democratizing how brands and boutique agencies connect with each other in the process of planning, scoping, pitching and paying for projects, Raptis told TechCrunch.

“At the core, we are taking the agency online,” Bibb added. “We are building a platform to streamline a complicated process for outsourcing high-value work and allow users to find, pay for and work with agencies in days rather than months.”

Brands can draft their own brief to articulate what they need, and Breef will connect them to a short list of agencies that match those requirements. Rather than a one- or two-month search, the company is able to bring that down to five days.

Bibb and Raptis decided to seek venture capital after experiencing demand — millions of dollars in projects are being created on the platform each month — and some tailwinds from the shift to remote work. They saw many brands that may have originally utilized in-house teams or agencies of record turn to distributed or smaller teams.

Due to the nature of agency work being expensive, Breef is processing large amounts of money over the internet, and the founders want to continue developing the technology and hiring talent so that it is a secure and trustworthy system.

It also launched its buy now, pay later project funding service, Breef(pay), to streamline payments to agencies and reduce cash flow challenges. Users can construct their own payment terms, mix up the way they are paid and utilize a credit line or defer payments to control external spend.

To date, Breef has more than 5,000 vetted boutique agencies in 20 countries on its platform and is able to save its users an average of 32% in product costs compared with a traditional agency model. It boasts a customer list that includes Spotify, Brex, Shutterstock, Bluestone Lane and Kinrgy.

Kevin Novak, founder of Rackhouse Ventures, said he met Raptis through the Australian tech community. He recently launched his first fund targeting startups in novel applications of data.

“When they were talking to me about what they wanted to do, I got intrigued,” Novak said. “I like finding marketplaces where the idea is well understood by the people involved. Looking at the matching problem, Emily and George have found a unique way to find ad agencies that hasn’t existed before.”

Rutter, a remote-first company, is developing a unified e-commerce API that enables companies to connect with data across any platform.

On Friday the company announced it was emerging from stealth with $1.5 million in funding from a group of investors including Haystack, Liquid 2 and Basis Set Ventures.

Founders Eric Yu and Peter Zhou met in school and started working on Rutter, which Zhou called “Plaid for commerce,” in 2017 before going through the summer 2019 Y Combinator cohort.

They stumbled upon the e-commerce API idea while working in education technology last year. The pair were creating subscription kits and learning materials for parents concerned about how their children would be learning during the global pandemic. Then their vendor customers had problems listing their storefronts on Amazon, so they wrote scripts to help them, but found that they had to write separate scripts for each platform.

With Rutter, customers only need one script to connect anywhere. Its APIs connect to e-commerce platforms like Shopify, Walmart and Amazon so that tech customers can build functions like customer support and chatbots, Yu told TechCrunch.

Lan Xuezhao, founding and managing partner of Basis Set Ventures, said via email that she was “super excited” about Rutter first because of the founders’ passion, grit and speed of iteration to a product. She added it reminded her of another team that successfully built a business from zero to over $7 billion.

“After watching them (Rutter) for a few years, it’s clear what they built is powerful: it’s the central nervous system of online commerce,” Xuezhao added.

As the founders see it, there are two big explosions going on in e-commerce: the platform side with the adoption of headless commerce — the separating of front end and back end functions of an e-commerce site, and new companies coming in to support merchants.

The new funding will enable Yu and Zhou to build up their team, including hiring more engineers.

Due to the company officially launching at the beginning of the year, Yu did not disclose revenue metrics, but did say that Rutter’s API volume was doubling and tripling in the last few months. It is also supporting merchants that connect with over 5,000 stores.

Some of Rutter’s customers are building one aspect of commerce, like returns, warranties and checkouts, but Yu said that since Shopify represents just 10% of e-commerce, the company’s goal is to take merchants beyond the marketplace by being “that unified app store for merchants to find products.”

“We think that in the future, the e-commerce stack of a merchant will look like the SaaS stack of a software company,” Zhou added. “We want to be the glue that holds that stack together for merchants.”

Three University of Michigan students are building Channels Inc., a communication software tailored for physical workers, and already racking up some big customers in the event management industry.

Siddharth Kaul, 18, Elan Rosen, 20, and Ibrahim Mohammed, 20, started the company after finding some common ground in retail and events. The company’s customer list boasts names like Marriott Hotels, and it announced a $520,000 seed round, led by Sahra Growth Capital, to give it nearly $570,000 in total funding.

Kaul grew up going to a lot of events in Kuwait and Dubai, but started noticing there was a delay in things that should happen and many processes were being done on pen and paper.

“The technology that was available was inharmonious and made it hard for physical workers to fulfill tasks,” Kaul told TechCrunch. “We saw it happening in the event management space, forcing workers to coordinate across technologies.”

Legacy communication platforms like Slack are aggregating communications, but are better for remote workers; for physical workers, they rely more on text communication, he said. However, the disadvantage with texting is that you have to keep scrolling to get to the new message, and old communication is lost amid all of the replies.

They began developing a platform for small hotels to help them transition to digital and provide communication in a non-chronological order that is easier to access, enables discussion and can be searched. Users of the SaaS platform can build live personnel maps to see where employees are and what the event floor looks like, prioritize alerts and automate tasks while monitoring progress.

Marriott became a customer after one of its employees saw the Channels platform was being tested at an event. He saw employees pulling out their phones and asked the manager why they were doing that, and was told they were testing out the product and referred him to Kaul.

“What they thought was helpful was that it was communication, and though the employees were checking their phones, it was quick and they remained attentive,” Kaul said.

Channels provides a solid platform in terms of analytics and graphical representation, which is a major selling point for customers, leading to initial traction and revenue for the company that Rosen said he expects can occur at the convention level the company is striving for.

The new funding will be used to grow in development and bring additional engineering talent to the team. In addition, it will allow Kaul and Rosen to continue with their studies, while Mohammed will be doing more full-time work. They want to increase their recurring revenue in the Middle East while building up operations in the United States.

Jamal Al-Barrak, managing partner of Sahra Growth Capital, said Channels was on his firm’s radar ever since they won the 2020 Dubai X-Series competition it sponsors. As a result of winning the competition, he was able to see the founders on multiple occasions and hear their growth.

Sahra doesn’t typically invest in companies like Channels, but the firm started a “seed sourcing effort” to make investments of between $200,000 and $800,000 into early-stage companies, Al-Barrak said. Channels is one of the first investments with that effort.

“Channels is one of our first investments in this initiative and they look very promising so far even compared to our investments before we started this initiative,” Al-Barrak said. He liked the founders’ work ethic and their focus on the event industry, which he called, “historically outdated and bereft of technological innovation.”

“Sid, Elan and Ibrahim are some of the youngest yet brightest entrepreneurs I have come across to this day and I have invested in over 25 technology startups,” he said. “Additionally, I enjoyed that they had proof of concept with a prior customer base and revenue. I was most impressed by their vision past their current industry and bounds as they want to encapsulate communication for all physical workers, whether it is events, retail or more.”

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When you enter the health tech industry as a new startup, an advisory board is a crucial foundational step. A board can guide you through industry-specific nuances, help you make important decisions and prove your legitimacy to investors looking for a strong industry background.

An advisory board will be able to give you strategic insights about both your company and the wider healthcare and technology industries.

In my experience of raising capital, the unpredictable financial situation at the beginning of the pandemic meant we nearly lost our $2 million round, but came through with a committed $250,000, which we used to bring in about $500,000 in revenue.

Something that helped this process was building our advisory board and starting small — we didn’t go for all of healthcare but instead focused on two healthcare verticals. This allowed us to prove our concept, build case studies and win contracts with specific teams in our customers’ companies.

It pays off to stay focused and prove your worth so that your advisory board members can champion you in niche markets, with the potential to expand in the future. For this reason, it’s important to identify the main intention behind your board, and exactly who should be on it.

Who to recruit

Three to five people is an ideal starting point for an advisory board, depending on the size and stage of your company. In health tech, you need more than just the healthcare perspective — you also need the insight of those who have already grown technology companies, perhaps outside of the industry. Our company’s board is an even split of two healthcare and two technology advisers, and, ideally, you want to find a fifth who is well versed in both industries.

An M.D., a Ph.D. from a respected institution or a thought leader in your relevant field of healthcare is the most important asset to an advisory board. These are the highly decorated physicians who have strong connections and act as a reference for their peers.

They provide instant credibility for your company, help you get into the minds of both patients and healthcare providers, and can outline how various health systems work.

Here’s another edition of “Dear Sophie,” the advice column that answers immigration-related questions about working at technology companies.

“Your questions are vital to the spread of knowledge that allows people all over the world to rise above borders and pursue their dreams,” says Sophie Alcorn, a Silicon Valley immigration attorney. “Whether you’re in people ops, a founder or seeking a job in Silicon Valley, I would love to answer your questions in my next column.”

Extra Crunch members receive access to weekly “Dear Sophie” columns; use promo code ALCORN to purchase a one- or two-year subscription for 50% off.

Dear Sophie,

I’m on an H-1B living and working in the U.S. I want to apply for a green card on my own. I’m concerned about only relying on my current employer and I want to be able to easily change jobs or create a startup. I’ve been looking at the EB-1A and EB-2 NIW.

I’m not sure if I would qualify for an EB-1A, but since I was born in India, I face a much longer wait for an EB-2 NIW. Any tips on how to proceed?

— Inventive from India

Dear Inventive,

Thanks for your question. Take a listen to my podcast episode in which I discuss the latest tech immigration news and delve into the benefits and requirements of the EB-1A green card for individuals of extraordinary ability and the EB-2 NIW (National Interest Waiver) green card, which as you know are the main employment-based green cards for which individuals can self-sponsor.

I recommend you consult an experienced immigration attorney who can evaluate your abilities and accomplishments and assess your prospects for each green card. After an initial consultation with new clients, we’re able to provide a lot more detail to folks on their specific options since these are such individualized pathways.

There are some groups of people who might need every advantage. Those can include folks born in India or China, who might face long green card backlogs. Another such group includes people whose skills and accomplishments might be borderline for an EB-1A green card for extraordinary ability. In some cases — if eligible and to have every opportunity for green card security and to mitigate wait times as much as possible — our clients choose to file both the EB-1A and EB-2 NIW in parallel.

The EB-1A is the highest priority green card and the standard for qualifying is much higher than for the EB-2 NIW. And that means an EB-1A is typically quicker to get, which is particularly the case now: According to the August 2021 Visa Bulletin, there is no wait for an EB-1A green card regardless of country of birth, while only individuals who were born in India and have a priority date of June 1, 2011 or earlier can proceed with their EB-2 NIW petition.

Please remember that the Visa Bulletin fluctuates and changes every month. Also, the EB-1A is currently eligible for premium processing on the I-140. Although there is talk to add this option to the EB-2 NIW one day, premium processing is not available for EB-2 NIW I-140s yet.

Last time I was in Hong Kong, a startup gave me a jar of mealworms as a snack. They were crunchy and a bit odd looking (as one might expect from a jar full of baked larvae). They really didn’t offer much in the way of flavor, though, so maybe supply your own seasoning.

For all sorts of sustainability reasons, there’s been a good deal of interest in these sorts of alternative protein sources — for humans and otherwise. Beta Hatch’s farming efforts are squarely focused on the latter, citing livestock and pets as primary targets for a farming process it says is “virtually zero-waste.”

Today the St. Louis-based firm announced $10 million in funding in a round led by Lewis & Clark AgriFood, with participation from Cavallo Ventures and Innova Memphis, which are both signed on as existing investors. The money comes as Beta Hatch is eyeing the expansion of its flagship farm in Cashmere, Washington.

“We are proud to be a part of building the future of farming as a member of the Washington agricultural community,” founder and CEO Virginia Emery said in a release. “We are excited for our presence in rural America to grow, as we employ and partner with the people in those communities to feed a growing global population.”

The company says the new facility will be the largest of its kind in North America, helping to push Beta Hatch to 10x its current output over the next year. The location is currently powered by renewably sourced energy.

Mealworms have proven intriguing as food sources for food sources, as evidenced by Ÿnsect’s $125 million raise way back in 2019.

Accord opened up its previously announced $6 million seed round to accept over $1 million from a group of CEOs and sales leads at companies they are working with to officially launch its business-to-business sales platform.

Brothers Ross and Ryan Rich co-founded the San Francisco-based company in 2019 with Wayne Pan to create a customer collaboration platform that, in the words of CEO Ross Rich, “makes the process of buying and selling suck less.”

The average sales deal can involve 14 people, just on the buyer side, which means teams do a lot of “herding cats” in order to drive consensus on sales, he said.

Instead, Accord’s application provides shared next steps and milestones for buying and selling teams to align on so that the right people are looped in at the right time.

“Our unique approach is helping management and sales, but also helping the buyer, which is how you build a relationship,” Ross Rich explained. “Before COVID, you could go onsite, but now you can’t do that. You also have to adjust to the buyer’s expectations, and with business-to-consumer, everything is ‘now and immediate.’ ”

The company’s target market is technology startups, but Ross Rich said Accord is now attracting interest from medical device companies and others where there is no software that bridges the gap between external parties.

Over the past six months, Accord doubled its team and was approached by multiple companies with acquisition offers. However, just a year-and-a-half into the company Rich said he is not entertaining those kinds of offers just yet.

“We have barely scratched the surface and would be selling ourselves short not having had a swing at it,” he added.

The company decided to focus on non-institutional investors when it raised this uncapped round, opting not to grow the board, Rich said.

Instead, it gathered a group of CEOs and sales leads from companies it works with — people who were getting it and seeing the value, including Mike Murchison, co-founder and CEO of Ada Support, who said via email that Ada’s B2B growth “exploded in part because of our focus on being a true partner — not simply a vendor — to our clients.” He added that Accord made it easy for Ada’s sales teams to offer a collaborative buying process.

Another investor, Stephanie Schatz, one of Accord’s advisors, said via email she got in on the round due to Ross Rich having “all the right ingredients for a successful founder,” and the product, which she said was taking into account how people want to buy.

“Ross has intelligence, drive, passion, vision and charisma, but on top of that, I have found that he has excellent instincts for leading a team and building a generational company,” she added. “Accord offers CEOs and sales leaders the opportunity to build a high-performing sales team from the very beginning that truly puts customers at the center.”

The new funding will go toward the general launch of the platform and adding to its team of 13. Rich expects a Series A round to quickly follow.

Since launch, “learning pods” have been controversial in the world of edtech. The term, somewhat synonymous with micro-schools, pandemic pods and small-group learning, describes small clusters of children within the same age range who are paired with a private instructor with the goal of replacing, or supplementing, school learning.

The concept took off last year as working parents looked for a way to supplement their children’s video-based school days with more engaging, personalized material. Some edtech entrepreneurs predicted that the trend would usher in a new wave of homeschooled children, which would disproportionately favor affluent families that could afford pod-learning to begin with. Tyton Partners estimates that 7 million students were enrolled in supplemental learning pods last year, which drove $12 billion in new spend.

Now, nearly a year after the first pods popped up, one startup coming out of Y Combinator has a fresh take on the role that the emerging learning model plays in schooling. KaiPod Learning, founded by the former chief product officer of Pearson Online Learning, Amar Kumar, recently launched its learning pod service that aims to connect homeschooled children with in-person, supplemental learning pods.

The Boston-based startup wants to be the go-to platform for online learners and learning pod families to get in-person interactions into their curriculum. The startup is starting by targeting homeschooling families in need of a boost to refresh existing curriculum.

KaiPod begins by helping parents pick the best online school for their child, whether it’s through a virtual micro-school like Sora Schools or a homeschooling program set up by locals. This process makes sure that students get access to a replacement from a traditional school that still meets core standards. Then, KaiPod tries to serve as a co-working space of sorts for any child that is going through the online school.

“We know we can’t do socialization as well in the cloud, we can’t do childcare as well in the cloud, and those are some of the things that parents look to schools for,” Kumar said. “And the fact that we got rid of them by moving everything online shows you that our priorities weren’t in the right place.”

Students are invited to come to a KaiPod center near them where they will interact with learning coaches, a role that Kumar defines as part-time teacher, part-time camp counselor.

The coaches are there to help through online coursework, while also leading enrichment activities meant to give the social edge back to the school day. Learning coaches are juggling a variety of curriculums within their centers, which could be a quality assurance challenge as KaiPod scales.

In the broadest sense, KaiPod is helping students in virtual school go to physical school, but this time with more flexibility and diversity when it comes to what the day looks like. For example, one kid may be following an entirely different curriculum than another; which means the physical space won’t be used for, say, a lecture, but may be used for a Socratic-style seminar that motivates children to share their separate learnings.

A WeWork for education?

Kumar thinks it’s a more inclusive approach to pods because it takes care of childcare along with education. The centers are open five days a week from 8 a.m. to 5:30 p.m.

Kumar pointed to Kumon as an example of how out of school, supplemental models can lead to academic enrichment. Kumon began as one-off centers, and eventually took over the franchise model until it became one of the largest after- school tutoring companies in the global market.

A non-insignificant part of KaiPod’s success depends on if homeschooling is here to stay, beyond the pandemic bump of interest. The National Center for Education Statistics shows that the percent of homeschool households in the United States tripled between 2020 to 2021, but the numbers don’t entirely reflect how the return to school will change those metrics.

In the meantime, KaiPod Learning ran an eight-student pilot program in Boston this year. Kumar said that one learning coach identified the early signs of a potential learning disability in a middle-schooler during a game, a sign he thinks illustrates how a small-group format helps instructors “engage with students in more ways than just didactic teaching.” KaiPod plans to open up five to seven more centers in the next few months.

“As we generate more awareness, we think entrepreneurs in other states will want to open centers using our playbook (à la franchise model) and we can power them through our technology layer [which is] affectionately code-named ‘KaiPod OS’, ” Kumar said. The locations of centers could show who KaiPod is selling to, as well as if families come from different socioeconomic backgrounds.

“At this point I have no interest in becoming WeWork for education, or anything like that,” he said. “Think of the centers as convenient areas where families can drop off their kids, stop in and see how the pod is doing.”

Webiny, an early-stage startup that launched in 2019 with an open-source, serverless CMS, had also developed a framework to help build the CMS, and found that customers were also interested in that to help build their own serverless apps. Today, Webiny announced a $3.5 million seed round to continue developing both pieces.

Microsoft’s venture fund M12 led the round, with participation from Samsung Next, Episode 1, Cota Capital and other unnamed investors. The company previously raised $348,000 in 2019.

Webiny founder Sven Al Hamad says that when the company launched, he had an inkling that serverless would be the future and started by building an open-source serverless CMS, but then something interesting happened.

“We spoke to more than 300 companies, who had actually approached us and they also believed that the future is going to be built on top of serverless infrastructure. While they were intrigued by the CMS we built, they were more intrigued in terms of how we built it because they had tried serverless and they had a poor experience,” Al Hamad explained.

It turned out that the Webiny team was spending the vast majority of its time building an underlying serverless framework in order to build the CMS on top of that, and he began to realize that maybe they should be marketing and selling both the framework and the CMS.

“There was still a lot of interest for the CMS, but a lot of companies wanted both, being able to use the CMS for some of the content platforms, but also being able to build custom APIs on top, custom business logic, all on top of serverless,” he said.

At that point, Al Hamad realized that his startup had two products and that’s where they stand today as they take on this new capital to help build out the company. While he is still working on building a community and reports that he hosts a Slack community with close to a 1,000 developers, the goal is to use this money to begin building commercial products on top of their open-source offerings.

That will involve some sort of enterprise offering with management features for complex environments, single sign-on, better security and so forth.

Serverless is a way of delivering infrastructure in an automated way, so that the developer can concentrate on building the application without worrying about delivering the correct amount of resources. But it requires a very specific way of programming that involves writing functions and triggers. Webiny’s serverless framework is designed to help developers build these specialized apps and the related bits to make it all work.

The company currently has nine employees, with plans to add about six more over the remainder of 2021. He says that diversity is top of mind, but there are challenges in a tight market for technical talent. “We are thinking openly about diversity, but the overall market in terms of the talent available is making it very hard for us to find that balance,” he said. He says that there needs to be an effort across the entire system to train more diverse talent in STEM roles, but he will continue to try look for a diverse staff in spite of the challenges.

He says that his employees are spread out, but when it’s possible to be back in the office, he intends to make offices available where there are pools of people, while giving them the flexibility to decide when and if to come in.

One, a startup that aims to bring “all-in-one banking” to the middle class, announced today that it has raised $40 million in a Series B round of funding.

Progressive Investment Company (the insurance giant’s investment arm) led the round, which included participation from Obvious Ventures, Foundation Capital, Core Innovation Capital and others. The financing brings One’s total raised since its 2019 inception to $66 million.

Since making its product generally available in September of 2020, Northern California-based One has grown to have “hundreds of thousands” of customers, according to CEO and co-founder Brian Hamilton, who previously co-founded PushPoint (which was acquired by Capital One).

“Stretched middle-income households and working families deal with financial stress on a daily basis and are largely unsupported by current offerings,” Hamilton said. “This can be viewed as a kind of a noisy market, and so this funding has been a good validation of the vision and kind of the products, in that we have been able to stand out in that market.”

Over the past 11 months, the startup has worked to enhance its core product offering, launching overdraft protection, an auto-save feature that rewards automatic savings contributions at 3.00% APY, cash flow-based credit lines and a credit builder product to help its customers build financial health. One claims that it has helped its users automatically save nearly $20 million collectively since its launch, a number that grows daily, according to Hamilton.

The company is also trying to change up how people share financial goals and responsibilities with individually configurable “Pockets” that it says can be “easily” shared with others and accessed via virtual and physical cards. 

“What we’re doing really is to re-integrate and unify what is otherwise a pretty splintered financial life for middle income households and families that are attempting to manage finances on a daily, weekly and monthly basis,” Hamilton told TechCrunch.

Over the past few years, he said, there have been a number of different fintech and bank products that people use to run their life “and they’re all starting to converge.”

The company was founded on the premise that traditional banking exists “on a system of fractured accounts and billions of dollars in hidden fees that leave customers living paycheck to paycheck despite steady incomes.” One says it is built on a “proprietary” technology core that aims to deliver saving, spending, sharing, budgeting and borrowing in a single account.

“Everybody’s trying to do a piece of everything, but they all started doing one thing,” Hamilton said. “But it’s really hard to back into the others or to bolt them on afterwards if you didn’t begin with the end in mind, kind of on an integrated basis. So that is essentially what we set out to build with One, with the idea to reunify credit and debit and savings and reintegrate the sharing of money with other people so it didn’t have to be done on a one-off transactional basis through Venmo or PayPal or Zelle.”

One’s banking services are provided by Coastal Community Bank, Member FDIC. The startup emphasizes that it’s a financial technology company, and “not a bank.”

It plans to use the new funding toward “fueling” customer growth, hiring and expanding its product offerings.

Charles Moldow, Foundation Capital general partner and One investor, said that challenger banks such as Chime and Aspiration focus on a debit card offering to subprime customers who are looking for lower bank fees and access to paychecks sooner.  

“These customers are generally treated poorly by banks and charged a lot of fees because they don’t generate much revenue for banks outside of interchange fees on debit purchases with little disposable income,” he said.

The real money made by banks, according to Moldow, is against mid-prime customers for both debit and lending.  

“These customers are harder to acquire because banks hate to lose them due to their large lifetime values,” he said. “One differs from the challenger banks in the market in that they have created a superior mobile banking experience for the 80% of the market that is not super prime or subprime. They have both a debit and credit offering and a vastly better user experience.”

The fintech is able to offer a user experience that is “materially” different from standard large bank offerings in that their back end infrastructure is a “modern” core and One is able to handle core checking, lending, money transfer and savings all on the same back end.

This means One can fully integrate those experiences (the aforementioned integrated offering “Pockets”).

“This differs from traditional banks which have each of these systems on top of different tech stacks which prevents them from providing integrated offerings,” he said. 

Also, by not having brick and mortar branches, the company is able to offer lower fees, more points and rewards and higher savings rates, Moldow added.