Flourish Fi - Empowering Positive Money Habits

For the exclusive use of G. Saint-Louis, 2024.
Date: April 1, 2024
GLORIA LEE
CHRISTOPHER BERNHART
KYLE DICKEY
ALEXANDRA FERREIRA
Flourish Fi: Empowering Positive Money Habits
It was always important to us that we were able to support

individuals on the journey toward better financial security. But
finding a revenue-generating business model was difficult.
—JESSICA ETING, CO-FOUNDER AND COO, FLOURISH FI1
In August 2023, Jessica Eting and Pedro Moura, Flourish’s co-founders, were preparing for a meeting with
their board of directors to reflect on the company’s trajectory and discuss the path forward. When Eting
and Moura founded Flourish in 2018 during an MBA course at UC Berkeley Haas, they set out on a mission
to help underserved individuals achieve financial security. Motivated by the financial adversity faced by
their own families, Eting and Moura aimed to make saving money attainable and rewarding for people who
lacked a financial safety net. The company’s first product, “Flourish Savings'' was a mobile app that
leveraged gamification features to incentivize its users to develop and maintain positive financial behavior.2
But in 2020, in response to challenges in scaling and monetizing its direct-to-consumer (D2C) app, the
company evolved its business model and began licensing its technology to banks, fintechs, and credit
unions, mostly in Latin America.
1
Interviews with Jessica Eting, Pedro Moura, Alejandro Gumucio, Luz Gomez, Anna Raptis, and Simon Blanchard, Oct 27
through Nov 15, 2023. Subsequent quotations are from the authors’ interviews unless otherwise stated.
2
“Gamification” involves the application of game design elements (e.g. point scoring, competition, prizes) to non-game contexts,
typically to encourage user engagement with a digital product or service.
Professor Gloria Lee prepared this case study with assistance from Christopher Bernhart (UC Berkeley Haas, Master of Business
Administration 2025), Kyle Dickey (UC Berkeley Haas, Master of Business Administration 2024), Alexandra Ferreira (UC
Berkeley Haas, Master of Business Administration 2024), and Case Writer Susan Thomas Springer as the basis for class
discussion rather than to illustrate either effective or ineffective handling of an administrative situation.
Copyright © 2024 by The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced, stored, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the express written permission of the Berkeley Haas Case
Series.
This document is authorized for use only by Gamal Saint-Louis in MBA summer 24 taught by MORTEZA SARDARI, Concordia University - Canada from May 2024 to Nov 2024.
FLOURISH FI 2
As Flourish’s software gained traction, Eting, and Moura began to wonder whether their original D2C
strategy was the most effective model to achieve the company’s mission. Flourish had already signed
thirteen institutional customers and aimed to double that number by the end of the year. Equipped with
nearly four million dollars in seed funding and grants, the team grew to seventeen employees across Latin
America and the United States. However, working with large clients brought its own unique challenges and
gave Flourish less control over how its technology impacted end users on the path to financial wellness.
Heading into the board meeting, Eting and Moura faced a difficult decision: Should they discontinue the
D2C product and dedicate all company resources to scaling the business-to-business (B2B) solution? Would
doing so undermine Flourish’s ability to stay true to its mission?
Founding Flourish
Eting and Moura met in 2015 during orientation week at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. They
were enrolled in Haas’ part-time MBA program, taking classes at night and on the weekends while working
full-time jobs. They were both board members of the Net Impact Club, and later worked together in an
Applied Innovation course, designed to be a crash course in entrepreneurship. Eting and Moura had very
different career paths. Eting’s experience was in the nonprofit sector while Moura came from a financial
services and startup background. However, they connected over their personal experiences and a shared
commitment to empowering underserved communities.
Background: Jessica Eting

Eting was born in California to immigrant parents, her father from the Philippines, and her mother a third-
generation Mexican American. Both came from low-income families and strove to create a better life for
their kids. When Eting was just nine years old, her father fell ill and for the rest of her childhood, she
watched her mother struggle to stay financially stable. “My mom hustled to financially support the family
on her own, working hard to stay above the need for the same government assistance programs she grew
up on,” said Eting. This experience magnified the importance of financial stability and motivated Eting to
prioritize her education. She excelled academically and went to college determined to find a well-paying
job that would support her family. As an undergraduate at UC Berkeley, she learned about the social impact
sector and discovered a personal drive for creating systems that empower individuals in communities like
the one where she’d grown up. After graduation, Eting went on to work in program management and
operations in Bay Area nonprofits that leveraged technology and philanthropy to create opportunities for
underrepresented communities. “At every step of the way I was able to learn more about the struggles that
exist within different community groups and the various levers that can be pulled to make individual and
systemic level changes,” Eting explained. Equipped with experience in the nonprofit sector, she decided to
pursue an MBA to broaden her perspective and explore ways to make an impact through socially conscious
business.
Background: Pedro Moura

Moura, born in Northeast Brazil, had immigrated to Northern California with his mother, sister, and brother
as a teenager. They moved into a three-bedroom house in Marin County, which they shared with thirteen
extended family members. Moura took on a series of jobs in high school to help make ends meet, including
delivering newspapers and helping his mom clean houses. “I learned to be resilient and manage my hard-
earned money. But as a first-generation financial citizen, it was tough navigating the system without much
guidance” he explained. Despite not having documented status, Moura was determined to go to college and
eventually earned a scholarship to play volleyball and study economics at UC Davis. During college, his
mother was deported back to Brazil, which strengthened his ambition to achieve financial security and bring
his family back together. He interned at Morgan Stanley and then worked in retail banking at JPMorgan
Chase Bank after graduation but soon felt uninspired by the work. “I quickly realized that the products I
FLOURISH FI 3
was selling weren’t quite serving the needs of everyday Americans,” said Moura. Driven by the desire to
help those in his community access the banking system, he landed a role at a startup called Oportun, a
responsible lender that provides credit-building loans to Latinos in the United States. Moura joined the
company at Series C (third major funding round) and over the next few years experienced an exciting period
of hypergrowth, as his team expanded from three to almost three hundred people. He enrolled in Haas’ part-
time MBA program while continuing to work at Oportun, curious to explore entrepreneurship while living
through the company’s IPO.
Conceiving the Idea

While in business school, Eting and Moura bonded over their similar upbringings and decided to team up
in the Applied Innovation class, merging Moura’s experience in financial services with Eting’s social sector
background. They started with a broad but ambitious vision to tackle the problem of financial literacy and
security in low-income communities. The team’s initial mission statement read: “50 million households in
America lack enough savings to sustain themselves for 3 months if faced with job loss or unforeseen
expenses. Flourish seeks to alleviate this pain.”3 Over the semester, using the lean startup4 methodology,
the team conducted hundreds of stakeholder interviews, developed prototypes, and repeatedly iterated on
the business model (Exhibits 1 and 2). They homed in on digitally savvy lower to middle-class millennials
in the United States as the target customer segment, and the idea was to create a savings account that would
help this demographic grow their wealth by incentivizing positive financial behavior, such as consistent
savings deposits, responsible investing, and on-time bill payment.
Launching a Company
Even when the semester ended and most of their classmates had moved on from their projects, Eting and
Moura continued to dedicate 10-15 hours per week to validate and refine their vision. In November 2017,
Moura decided to leave his job at Oportun to work on Flourish full-time. Six months later, after graduating
from business school, Eting also took the leap and in July 2018, they incorporated Flourish Savings, Inc.
Without steady income, the pair set out to raise funding. Some of their classmates pitched in as angel
investors and they earned a $5,000 grant from UC Berkeley’s Dean Startup Seed Fund (Exhibit 3). They
also began to delineate roles and responsibilities, agreeing that Moura would be CEO and Eting COO. Eting
explained this decision:
From the beginning, it was clear that Pedro was very strong externally, much more the
communicator, so it made sense for him to take on the CEO role and be the face of the company
that would sell the vision to investors and partners. Given my operational experience and my
strength of diving into problems and finding creative solutions, it made sense for me to be more
internally focused. I think it fell together well.
Eting and Moura spent much of the first year prototyping and building a minimum-viable product. They
partnered with a gaming studio, hired developers in Mexico, and brought on a part-time CTO to help bring
the prototypes to life. Then, in May 2019, they launched Flourish Savings, a free mobile app that offered a
savings account embedded with gaming elements and a rewards engine to encourage positive financial
behavior (Exhibit 4). With a limited budget to market the app, Flourish brought its solution directly to
organizations that already had access to the communities it wanted to reach. The company engaged with
nonprofits focused on financial wellness, financial aid offices at universities, and college scholarship
foundations. The early results were encouraging. Within a few months, Flourish had over one thousand
3
Brooks, Jennifer, et al. Excluded from the Financial Mainstream: How the Economic Recovery is Bypassing Millions of
Americans CFED, Assets and Opportunities Scorecard, 2015.
4
Lean startup is a methodology for developing businesses and products that aims to shorten product development cycles and
rapidly discover if a proposed business model is viable.
FLOURISH FI 4
users and those who were engaging with the app’s game modules regularly were saving more money. On
average, active users saved $213 in the first three months and they interacted with the app two to three times
per week (Exhibit 5).
Still, Eting and Moura knew that to reach a wider audience and scale their impact, they would need to
monetize the product. Because the app was aimed at supporting low and middle-income individuals,
Flourish was committed to finding a business model that would not have them charge the final consumer.
They had a few different hypotheses for how they could generate sustainable revenue. One idea was to
partner with local businesses that would sponsor coupons and rewards in the app. Another hypothesis was
that because Flourish tracked user transactions, like cell phone bill payments, perhaps companies would
pay Flourish to advertise lower-cost offerings to consumers. However, both these monetization strategies
would require Flourish to grow its user base exponentially, a challenge that was unrealistic in the short
term. One approach that seemed most promising was to market Flourish to employers as a wellness benefit
for their employees. However, Eting and Moura quickly realized that this model would be difficult to
implement and inconsistent with their mission, since there was no financial incentive (e.g. tax breaks) for
employers, and the companies that had large enough wellness budgets to offer a savings app perk were
typically not employing the demographic that Flourish wanted to target.
Adding Business to Business (B2B)

Faced with the challenges of scalability and monetization with the D2C app, Eting and Moura wondered
how they could continue to stay true to their mission while finding a stable and scalable source of revenue.
By the end of 2019, they began to see a growing interest in their product from financial institutions,
especially in Latin America. “According to what we were hearing from the market, all signals seemed to
be pushing us in that direction. It really showed the most promise for the future in terms of a stronger
business model,” said Eting.
Entering a New Market

In October 2019, Flourish began to engage with Sicoob, Brazil’s largest credit union.5 Sicoob had heard
about Flourish’s early success at a small scale in the United States and they were intrigued to see how the
technology could impact a larger pool of users. In particular, Sicoob was having difficulty retaining its
younger members and asked Flourish to help. “Sicoob was noticing that young adults were opening
accounts but then not coming back to make deposits. They wanted us to help improve their digital
experience to better engage and retain these users,” explained Moura. Eager to test how its technology could
support institutional clients, Flourish agreed to a short-term pilot with Sicoob.
The Sicoob pilot was the first sign that financial institutions represented a big opportunity for Flourish, both
in terms of financial sustainability and the potential for scale. Simon Blanchard, an adviser to Flourish and
a tenured professor at Georgetown University who studies consumer behavior and financial wellness for
low-income populations, explained how Flourish began to reorient its value proposition:
Flourish was quick to realize there was an unmet need in the market. Not only would their product
benefit small to medium-sized financial institutions that didn’t have the scale to develop their own
apps, but also larger financial institutions operating in underserved markets that would significantly
benefit from financial inclusion. So it was a mix of realizing their tool would get them to the
population that they were perfectly suited to serve. It was a classic case of repositioning.
5
A credit union is a member-owned not-for-profit financial institution that offers an array of traditional banking services,
including accepting deposits and making loans. As of January 2023, Sicoob (Sistema de Cooperativas de Crédito do Brasil) had
seven million members and more than four thousand service points across Brazil.
FLOURISH FI 5
Though Eting and Moura were convinced that a B2B offering was necessary to provide Flourish with the
financial stability and scale to fulfill its mission, they wondered how it might affect their ability to drive
impact. “Will we be pulled by the needs of financial institutions in a direction that is actually not beneficial
to end users?” they wondered. Eting and Moura understood that to strike the right balance between growth
and impact, they would need to partner with institutions that shared their culture and vision.
BancoSol
In late 2020, Flourish signed its first corporate client, BancoSol, a Bolivian bank and one of the top
microfinance institutions in Latin America. With over 1 million clients and $2.3B in assets, BancoSol
provided microloans to individuals and small businesses with a mission to provide “opportunities for a
better future” to the low-income sector in Bolivia.6 In late 2019, BancoSol hired a team of external
consultants to help support the bank’s digital transformation. The consultants conducted a needs assessment
and identified that BancoSol’s customers, who were often microentrepreneurs trying to grow their business,
wanted to increase savings and access better interest rates on savings accounts. This finding led the bank to
explore solutions in the market, which is when it came across Flourish. BancoSol was particularly interested
in the gamification elements of Flourish’s app and wanted to integrate a custom version of the technology
into its own digital banking services. Alejandro Gumucio, BancoSol’s Head of Innovation and Digital
Transformation at the time, described the bank’s motivations for the partnership: “We turned to Flourish as
an engagement tool to encourage our clients to be more digital. Our customers had phones but were afraid
of using mobile banking services. We wanted to encourage them to transact on their phone, to pay their
bills, make deposits, or check their balance.”
In early 2021, leveraging Flourish’s technology and expertise, BancoSol launched “GanaSol,” a rewards
engine that was embedded within the bank’s existing digital banking app. In GanaSol, users could take
specific actions to earn points, which could then be redeemed for raffle tickets or other prizes (Exhibit 6).
The app’s incentive mechanisms were designed to achieve three main goals:
1. Promote digital transactions: users earned points by paying their bills through the app instead
of in-person
2. Incentive savings: users earned points by increasing their account balance by a certain amount
3. Drive financial literacy - users earned points by correctly responding to a financial knowledge
trivia quiz
To measure the success of the product, BancoSol tracked several key metrics, including active users,
transaction volume, and account balance. Within a year, 30% of the bank’s customers were using
GanaSol and the results were impressive. Compared to customers not using the app, GanaSol users
deposited 20% more in their savings accounts and their digital transaction volume was 266% higher.7
Perhaps the most compelling indicator of the GanaSol’s efficacy was what happened when the reward
modules had to be temporarily shut down due to unexpected regulatory changes. Because prizes in
GanaSol included raffle and lottery tickets, BancoSol needed approval from the Bolivian gaming
authority to operate the gamification module. Due to processing delays and government bureaucracy, the
company’s gaming license expired and GanaSol had to be disabled for fifty days. During this period, app
logins decreased by 21%, digital bill payments decreased by 28%, and loan repayments decreased by
36%.8 It was clear that Flourish’s gamification technology provided key incentives for customers to adopt
and sustain positive financial habits. Excited by these results, BancoSol renewed its partnership with
6
“BancoSol (Bolivia) Featured by Harvard Business School,” GABV - Global Alliance for Banking on Values. January 28, 2016.
https://www.gabv.org/stories-from-gabv/bancosol-bolivia-featured-by-harvard-business-school/
7
GanaSol Results Report, BancoSol, September 2023.
8
Blanchard, Simon J. and Palazzolo, Mike, “Game Over? Assessing the Impact of Gamification Discontinuation on Mobile
Banking Behaviors” Georgetown McDonough School of Business, July 31, 2023.
FLOURISH FI 6
Flourish and continued to scale the usage of GanaSol. Meanwhile, Eting and Moura decided to double
down on their B2B offering. Over time, Flourish Savings rebranded to Flourish Fi, officially expanding
the company’s vision: from a savings app to a software company, from directly serving individuals to also
serving financial institutions, and from focusing on the United States to Latin America.
The LatAm Fintech Market

Overview
The financial technology (fintech) industry throughout Latin America (LatAm) was heavily concentrated
in five categories across five markets: Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, Argentina, and Chile. In 2022,
companies facilitating digital payments made up 22% of all fintech companies, followed by lending
(18%), enterprise financial management (12%), insurance tech (11%), and fintech as a service (11%).
Geographically, Brazil had the highest concentration of fintech companies (31%), followed by Mexico,
Colombia, Argentina, and Chile.9
Unbanked populations represented a key target market for fintech firms in all subsectors. In 2021, 70% of
Latin Americans were considered unbanked (no access to checking/savings accounts) or underbanked (no
access to loans/credit), and 58% of point-of-sale purchases were still made in cash.10 Furthermore,
women, youth, and less financially secure people were disproportionately represented in the underserved
population. In the Brazilian market, for example, women were 1.4x as likely to be unbanked.11 Because of
these trends, fintech startups saw an opportunity to disrupt the traditional banking industry and broaden
financial access to historically underserved groups. In the late 2010s and early 2020s, the digital banking
sector experienced a major boom, as “neobanks”, or banks that operate completely digitally, began to
enter the market. In 2018, only 9 million people living in LatAm had an account in a neobank; by 2021,
this number had grown to 77 million.12
Growth and Access

The fintech industry experienced explosive growth in Latin America from 2017 to 2022. Over this period,
the number of fintech companies grew from 631 to 2,444, representing a 287% increase. 13 In 2021, LatAm's
venture capital investment reached $15.7B, nearly half of which went to fintech startups.14 Much of this
growth was catalyzed by evolving banking and financial policy. In 2018, Mexico became the first LatAm
country to pass an “open banking” regulation that mandated data sharing across financial institutions, and
Brazil followed suit in 2020.15 With a more transparent and inclusive regulatory environment, the LatAm
fintech market became increasingly favorable to new entrants. Similar policies were passed in Chile and
Colombia, and the fintech sector also experienced swift, albeit less substantial, growth in Peru, Costa Rica,
Guatemala, and Uruguay over the same period.
9
“Fintech in Latin America: statistics report of Fintech in Latin America,” Statista, 2023.
https://www.statista.com/study/56664/fintech-in-latin-america/.
10
Kemp, Patricia, “FinTech Is Driving Financial Inclusion in Latin America.” Forbes, July 18, 2022.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/patriciakemp/2022/07/18/fintech-is-driving-financial-inclusion-in-latin-america/
11
“Unbanked population in Brazil, by demographic,” Statista, August 7, 2023.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1370626/access-to-financial-services-in-brazil/
12
Wilson, Isabel, “Digital Banking and Economic Development: Inclusion and Exclusion in Latin America,” Aug 7, 2023.
jsis.washington.edu/news/digital-banking-and-economic-development-inclusion-and-exclusion-in-latin-america/
13
Topic: Fintech in Latin America.” Statista, 31 Aug. 2023,
14
“LAVCA Trends in Tech,” LAVCA, 2022, https://lavca.org/industry-data/2022-lavca-trends-in-tech/
15
Pianese, Barbara, “Brazil leads as Open Banks Take Off,” The Banker, July 4, 2023. www.thebanker.com/Brazil-leads-as-
open-banking-takes-off-in-Latam-1688455745.
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In the early 2010s, gamification, or the application of game design elements to traditionally non-game
environments, gained popularity as a marketing tool to influence customer behavior, especially in the realm
of digital technology. Research studies showed that gamification could be a powerful means of activating
or satisfying user motivations and technology companies like Amazon, Uber, and Duolingo began
leveraging these strategies to drive engagement with their customers.16 As digital banking grew in
popularity, gamification also made its way into the financial services sector. A survey of credit union leaders
conducted by the Filene Research Institute revealed that 94% believed gamification could increase savings
behavior, while 89% expressed confidence in its ability to strengthen member loyalty.17
In 2023, Flourish estimated its serviceable addressable market (SAM) was $10.3B: $6.8B for its B2B
product, representing the total annual spending on disruptive technology by banks, fintechs, and credit
unions in Latin America, and $3.5B for its U.S-based DTC savings app, assuming $45 in revenue per user
across 79 million online banking users between the ages of 18-35.18
Competition
While a surging fintech industry in Latin America coupled with the growing excitement around
gamification created an opportunity for Flourish to find success in the market, the rise of neobanks and
other fintech-as-service companies also presented a competitive threat to Flourish. Some financial
institutions relied on legacy software vendors like Oracle to build customer loyalty programs and others
began to build their own gamified learning and engagement platforms. In 2022, for example, Nubank
acquired Olivia AI, which used machine learning to help customers better manage their money.19 Other
financial technology companies with similar value propositions to Flourish, such as Personetics and
Kasisto, had also entered the space to compete for a slice of the nascent LatAm B2B fintech market.
Scaling the Business
Funding
Eting and Moura’s first goal was to raise enough capital to build out a team and invest in product
development. As the CEO and public face of the company, Moura led the fundraising efforts. At first, he
was skeptical about raising money from traditional venture capital firms, concerned that this funding model
would distract from their mission. He approached foundations and other sources of alternative capital, but
the process proved difficult and time-consuming. It was not until Moura began approaching VCs that his
luck changed. Moura explained the shift: “We spent so much time looking for alternative capital to prioritize
impact, but then we realized that we needed to prioritize building a business first, and VC money could be
a catalyst for impact. That’s when we were able to gain some traction.”
In March 2021, Flourish raised $1.5M in a “pre-seed” round led by Canary, a Brazil-based venture capital
firm that invests in early-stage technology companies. Flourish used most of this capital to build out its
technical team, hiring several new product managers and engineers in Brazil. In 2022, Moura had his sights
set on a larger funding round, but a tightening venture capital market made it an uphill battle. Finally, in
December 2022, Flourish announced a $2.3M seed round from a mix of U.S., Latin American, and global
16
Ciuchita R, Heller J, Köcher S, Leclercq T, Sidaoui K, Stead S, “It is really not a game: an integrative review of gamification
for service research,” Journal of Service Research, Feb 2023.
17
Blanchard, Simon J. and Palazzolo, Mike, “Game Over? Assessing the Impact of Gamification Discontinuation on Mobile
Banking Behaviors” Georgetown McDonough School of Business, July 31, 2023.
18
Market sizing data (source: Flourish Fi)
19
Sy, Ryan, “Brazil's Nubank closes Olivia AI acquisition,” S&P Global Market Intelligence, January 4, 2022.
https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-insights/latest-news-headlines/brazil-s-nubank-closes-olivia-ai-
acquisition-68279204
FLOURISH FI 8
investors, including Magma Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Seedstars. The round also included
investments from impact venture capital firms like Amplifica Capital, which focused on funding female
founders and startups that promote equitable outcomes. Anna Raptis, Founder, and Managing Partner at
Amplifica, described what led her firm to invest in Flourish:
What was interesting about Flourish was that we had seen a lot of fintech companies offering
financial products that, more than anything, encourage people to take on more debt, and consume
more, which isn’t necessarily contributing to financial well-being. And what we really liked about
the approach of Flourish is that Jessica and Pedro are very much focused on improving the financial
well-being of the users. They also expressed authentic motivation for building this based on their
own experience.
Flourish used most of the capital it raised to hire the talent it needed to support its growth. The organization
was split into two main divisions: business development and technology. Within business development, the
company hired for roles in marketing, customer success, and sales, and within technology, it added
engineers, product managers, and UX designers. (Exhibit 7).
Institutional Customer Acquisition

Equipped with funding and a customer success story in BancoSol, Flourish set out to expand its institutional
client base and grow revenue, homing in on mid-size banks, credit unions, and fintechs in Latin America
as its target. Flourish’s product was marketed as a “modularized SaaS platform” that could be easily
integrated into an institution’s existing technology stack and configured to fit its unique needs (Exhibit 8).
Its core product modules included an engagement engine that provided incentives and nudges for users and
a financial knowledge module that provided users with educational insights on their financial journey.
Institutional customers were charged for the cost of implementation, a flat monthly subscription fee, and a
variable fee based on usage (Exhibit 9).
By the end of 2022, Flourish had signed six customers, and by October 2023, this number had grown to
thirteen, at an average annual contract value of $45,000. Its client base now included another Bolivian bank,
Banco Económico, and several Brazilian fintechs, including Will Bank, Qista, and Alt Bank, among others.
Though motivations and use cases varied slightly across customers, the common thread was that they
wanted to leverage Flourish’s gamification software to better engage and educate their users. “Bringing
Flourish's solution together with our product delivered us a competitive edge that delivers more value to
our customers,” explained Leonardo Grapeia, Qista’s CEO.20 Meanwhile, for Flourish, each additional
customer not only provided greater financial sustainability through recurring revenue but also allowed
Flourish to reach more individuals by tapping into the existing user bases of the institutions.
Partnership with Mastercard

As Flourish continued to expand its customer footprint, the company also formed a key partnership with a
large and established player in the financial technology industry – Mastercard. In 2021, Flourish was
selected to be part of Mastercard’s “Start Path” program, which gave the young company access to the
Mastercard brand and ecosystem, including a global network of fintech startups working to promote
financial inclusion and sustainable economic growth. Then, in July 2022, after a competitive application
process, Flourish received a substantial grant from Mastercard’s philanthropic hub, the Center for Inclusive
Growth. The goal of the grant was to provide microentrepreneurs in Brazil’s favelas (slums or shanty towns)
with access to digital tools and financial services, and so over the next year, Flourish partnered with
Brazilian NGOs and fintechs to develop features in its app aimed at enhancing the financial journey for
20
Customer testimonial from Flourish’s website
FLOURISH FI 9
microentrepreneurs. Luz Gomez, VP of Mastercard’s Center of Inclusive Growth, explained how the
partnership was mutually beneficial for Flourish and Mastercard:
Prior to partnering with us, Flourish had been mostly focused on the consumer, but we at the Center
were largely focused on micro and small businesses, so we saw an opportunity to help augment
their services and expand their impact. Flourish also didn’t yet have a big presence in Brazil, so the
grant program helped them gain experience in Brazil and connected them to some new clients.
Growing Pains
While Flourish’s B2B offering brought new opportunities, it also created challenges that Eting and Moura
worried might threaten the company’s mission and financial sustainability. First, selling to large and often
bureaucratic financial institutions meant long sales cycles and unpredictable revenue. It also proved difficult
to standardize the implementation and customer enablement process, given that no two customer use cases
looked exactly alike. Prioritizing customer acquisition over cost reduction, Flourish often found itself
developing custom features for new clients, leading to sales-to-launch cycles of four to six months. Without
faster and more reliable revenue, Eting and Moura worried about their ability to scale quickly and move
toward profitability.
Flourish also struggled to maintain commitment to its existing customers while pursuing new contracts.
One of its early customers, for example, was accustomed to hands-on attention and swift responsiveness to
its needs but experienced a decline in the level of support it received as Flourish scaled. “As Flourish
incorporated more customers and saw some employee turnover, we were left alone for a bit,” the client
explained. Eting and Moura knew that their existing customers were the company’s greatest asset, so
wanted to ensure that growth did not come at the expense of client loyalty and retention. At the same time,
they were conscious of not letting their corporate clients lead them away from their mission to help
individuals on their journey to financial security. Licensing the technology to institutions rather than
directly to consumers meant that Flourish no longer had full visibility and control over how end users
interacted with the app. Thus, the company needed to ensure its customers shared a commitment to positive
impact and had to be willing to turn away those who did not. Eting described one of the first times Flourish
rebuffed a potential customer due to mission misalignment:
A customer approached us wanting to use our product to gamify credit card usage, basically just to
encourage as many credit card transactions as possible. We were a small company, and it was really
hard to say no. [The customer] would have been a good name and we desperately needed customers
but, in the end, we did not want our product to enable consumers to fall into more debt. I think for
us it was the right decision to walk away and helped us answer an important question: What is it
we are willing to go after?
Because financial institutions make money in ways that are not always beneficial to consumers (e.g.
overdraft fees, late credit card payments, etc.), Flourish needed to be selective in bringing its technology to
market. The company was focused on partnering with institutions that were looking to apply gamification
to motivate behavior that was both good for business and good for the end user, such as encouraging savings
or responsible investing. But even while their dedication to the mission remained steadfast, Eting and Moura
felt increasing pressure to add new clients and continue to scale the business.
The Path Forward

At the outset of 2023, Flourish had rallied around a set of audacious goals. By year-end, the company
wanted to land twenty-five institutional customers, reach one million end users, and significantly grow
annual recurring revenue, all with an eye on raising a Series A funding round in 2024. In preparing for the
FLOURISH FI 10
August board meeting, Eting and Moura reflected on the state of the business and the road ahead. Flourish’s
B2B product broadened the company’s reach and diversified its revenue model. However, it also brought
new challenges, including long sales cycles, product customization requests, and less control over end-user
impact. Even as the B2B strategy took center stage, Flourish had continued to operate its D2C product with
a few hundred users and was running research pilots funded by a $99k grant from the Pennsylvania State
Treasury and Commonwealth, a financial security nonprofit. But with the pilots set to expire and growing
technology maintenance costs (Exhibits 10 and 11), Eting and Moura grappled with a difficult decision.
Was it time for Flourish to sunset its D2C product and focus all effort on developing and selling its software
platform? Moura described the tension that he and Eting faced:
In the B2B model, there are new forces of influence, because we are trying to drive systemic
change. The question is how can we convince more traditional institutions to adopt something new
and also buy into our mission? How do our processes and products need to change? That’s what
keeps me up.
Case Discussion Questions

1. Should Flourish discontinue its D2C product? Why or why not?
2. How has Flourish’s theory of change evolved?
3. How can Flourish stay true to its mission while pursuing greater scale through the B2B product?
4. What are the major challenges to the financial sustainability of Flourish’s business? How can the
company mitigate these risks?
FLOURISH FI 11
Exhibit 1 Flourish’s first-ever business model
Source: Flourish Fi
FLOURISH FI 12
Exhibit 2 Initial product prototypes
Source: Flourish Fi
FLOURISH FI 13
Exhibit 3 Letter of recommendation for Flourish’s application to the UC Berkeley Dean Startup
Seed Fund
Source: Flourish Fi
FLOURISH FI 14
Exhibit 4 Flourish Savings mobile app
Source: Flourish Fi
Exhibit 5 Impact metrics - D2C Savings app
Source: Flourish Fi
FLOURISH FI 15
Exhibit 6 Screenshots of the GanaSol modules
Source: BancoSol
Exhibit 7 Company org structure
Source: Flourish Fi
FLOURISH FI 16
Exhibit 8 B2B Product Overview
Source: Flourish Fi
FLOURISH FI 17
Exhibit 9 B2B Pricing Model
Exhibit 10 D2C Product Cost Estimates
Category Estimated annual cost
API for banking infrastructure $180,000
Marketing $60,000
Labor support $250,000
Prizes/rewards for users $30,000
Other (e.g., legal, fraud prevention, etc.) $30,000
TOTAL $550,000
FLOURISH FI 18
Exhibit 11 Flourish’s Theory of Change
Source: Flourish Fi

Flourish Fi - Empowering Positive Money Habits

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Flourish Fi - Empowering Positive Money Habits

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For the exclusive use of G. Saint-Louis, 2024.

Date: April 1, 2024

Flourish Fi: Empowering Positive Money Habits

It was always important to us that we were able to support

—JESSICA ETING, CO-FOUNDER AND COO, FLOURISH FI1

Background: Jessica Eting

Background: Pedro Moura

Conceiving the Idea

Adding Business to Business (B2B)

Entering a New Market

The LatAm Fintech Market

Growth and Access

Scaling the Business

Institutional Customer Acquisition

Partnership with Mastercard

The Path Forward

Case Discussion Questions

Exhibit 1 Flourish’s first-ever business model

Exhibit 2 Initial product prototypes

Exhibit 4 Flourish Savings mobile app

Exhibit 5 Impact metrics - D2C Savings app

Exhibit 6 Screenshots of the GanaSol modules

Exhibit 7 Company org structure

Exhibit 8 B2B Product Overview

Exhibit 9 B2B Pricing Model

Exhibit 10 D2C Product Cost Estimates

Category Estimated annual cost

API for banking infrastructure $180,000

Labor support $250,000

Prizes/rewards for users $30,000

Other (e.g., legal, fraud prevention, etc.) $30,000

Exhibit 11 Flourish’s Theory of Change

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