And it really does feel like it has accelerated not only a lot of change just in the digital economy and whatnot, but I think also, these concepts, these ideas, like, you’re just saying, I think a lot of people have become a bit more understanding, a bit more empathetic, you know, recognizing that, hey, just because something is one way for me, that doesn’t mean it’s the way for everyone else. But kind of, what does that mean in terms of an official ARR is to be signing? I like that. I mean, it’s kind of that, you’re bringing that, sort of, you go through the drive-thru at Starbucks and you pay for the person’s coffee who’s behind you, right. So, we did put into BELLA, like, in December, we would put $1 million in BELLA and BELLA will just pop-up and say, you know what, hey, Jason, this coffee is on me or this meal is on me. So, I think this is also what people are like, yeah, I want to help others, I know there’s a need, or I may need help. We can do all this fancy marketing and spend millions of dollars on acquiring consumers or we can say, you know, we’re looking for members, we’re looking for people.
They’re very conducive to social distancing, you know, it’s not the crowded mall atmosphere, you can get your own space, you have ventilation, things like that, so people are more comfortable going, and the numbers are showing that. Then you have traditional, what I call fintech, and fintech basically is like, we’re going to take traditional banking, but put it in an app, make it easy to open a checking and have a credit card account, but what we’re seeing there is that, maybe I get lower interest rates, I’m going to get lower fees or higher interest, little bit higher interest, but it’s still, they’re keeping it in the commodity. We rather have, like, a core group come in, they start telling people, and we’ll take care of you. I mean, if you kind of take into consideration all stakeholders then I think you see a lot of results, and it seems in line with that conscious capitalism movement that we’re so fond of here at The Motley Fool. For all of the convenience that we get, we do lose a lot of those concepts like empathy, and love, and compassion, and whatnot.
I mean, that doesn’t exist anymore, you’re right, we’ve become commoditized and technology, you know, I always like to say, it giveth and it taketh away. I’ll tell you a funny story, it’s a true story, literally my daughter who’s four, when she was born, you know, people gave us some money for when she got baptized. She’s one of Fast Company’s most creative people in business and Fortune’s businessperson of the year. For certain of the Company’s larger customers, the Company may provide call center labor through an arrangement with one or more of several qualified vendors. We are going to manage it as human labor to start, but we are very quickly going to automate, and our goal is to reduce that human labor. And what was really interesting, it’s a blank slate, we didn’t think about checking accounts and savings accounts, because we don’t want to be just the bank, we thought differently about what it should be if you have your money sitting somewhere, what are the possibilities of doing great things with that? And that’s the idea, it’s like, we have this whole pay-it-forward idea in the platform, which is very much resonating, because in the last two-and-a-half weeks, since we started to talk about this, mostly on social networks, we’ve had 25,000 people sign up already.
LoCascio: So, you know, we have many banking customers around the world, and we’re powering all these large brands, like I talk about, with this idea of creating a more outstanding customer experience. So, you can imagine, you know, this was a year-and-a-half ago. And that’s where BELLA started, which was a year-and-a-half ago. LoCascio: Right. And then sometimes what BELLA does. And I literally got a notice the other day that they basically shut the account down and they’ve transferred the money somewhere, and they can’t find it right now. So, I put $700, I opened up a savings account for her in Chase, which is the bank I was in. My wife and I opened our accounts there, we opened her account. Kara Goldin: And the story, when I went into Target first week of that week of March 16th and I’m in there, poor guy at Target, he missed his buddy Ben.