The Author
Dan O'Malley
Chief Executive Officer
Dan believes banking needs change. Sustainable change. As an executive in the banking and credit card industries, Dan realized that financial services suffer from some serious incentive problems. Earning rewards for using a credit card encourages you to — surprise — use your credit card too much. And building big, expensive bank branches encourages under-investment in phone and internet customer service. Dan believes that organizations that create the right incentives can change industries for the better, even ones with as much need for help as banking. That’s why he founded PerkStreet.
Before PerkStreet, Dan co-founded Capital One’s Payments division, where he created the industry-changing decoupled debit card and launched the company’s prepaid business. Dan loves launching breakout new strategies, which he did in Capital One’s corporate strategy team and at Oliver Wyman, one of the world’s largest management consultancies. He also loves math (even if that makes him a dork), with a background in quantitative analysis and a BSE in Operations Research from Princeton University. Other loves? Baseball, cooking, and lightly roasted African coffees.
Photo by Bryce Vickmark Photography
Celebrated American author Mark Twain famously quipped that classic literature is, “Something that everyone wants to have read and nobody wants to read.” Financial literacy isn’t much different than the bookish kind — something everyone wants but so confusing, stressful, and boring that most people don’t get it.
April has been designated “financial literacy month”. (Let your enthusiasm run rampant for a moment; now collect yourself.) This is the wrong approach — you don’t need a month of poring over financial education materials. First, you’re not likely to do it. Second, the goal isn’t to be more literate, the goal is to save or earn yourself more money. And the best way to accomplish that is to find simple ways to be smarter, then act on them, making changes to how you spend and save your money. The New York Times just did a great job of showing how it’s done, publishing a financial tune-up special section with tips meant to be acted upon within one day. This is the approach we like at PerkStreet.
To kick off April’s financial literacy “being smart” month, I’ve asked the team at PerkStreet to change direction with our blog. Today, banks don’t publish much information about how to maximize your money. It’s usually not in their interest to do so; it’s certainly not in their culture. Every week, we’ll be publishing several easy-to-understand ways you can get more from what you spend and save. At PerkStreet, we’re all bankers with a deep understanding of how financial services work from the inside. We’ll be putting that knowledge to work for you. And we’ll also be sharing insights from other respected voices within the financial services community.
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Dan