Welcome Tech — Technology powering immigrant success

Immigration is transforming the United States. Immigration affects virtually every community. Healthy communities offer broad financial access to all residents, but immigrants and immigrant communities lack broad financial access.

In the US, immigrants are far less likely to use a variety of financial services than their native-born counterparts, including checking and savings accounts, business loans, and mortgages. The success of second-generation immigrants depends significantly on how much access they have to financial services as well as their current well-being. Access to financial services may give immigrant households a tool to deal with fluctuating income and find strategies to escape poverty because immigrants are frequently members of economically vulnerable groups. However, immigrants' access to financial services, particularly at mainstream institutions, may be hampered by issues including low income, limited English language competence, residential segregation, cultural barriers, or a lack of bank expertise and other financial institutions.

That’s what Welcome Tech and Amir Hemmat, Welcome Tech’s Co-founder, President, and CEO, have set out to solve. Welcome Tech is the world's first digital platform to provide the global, multigenerational immigrant community with the linguistically and culturally relevant resources to thrive in a new country.

Helping immigrants receive financial services — Welcome Tech

Welcome Tech, a For Benefit corporation founded by Amir Hemmat and Raul Lomeli, is the world's first platform for connecting the 250 million global immigrant community with the knowledge, goods, and services they require to thrive in a new country.

Welcome Tech delivers linguistically and culturally relevant tools to the global, multigenerational immigrant population in order for them to succeed in a new country. The unique customer insights, first-party data, and proprietary technology of Welcome Tech inform economical, fair, and best-in-market tailored solutions across essential services.

With approximately three million active users, Welcome Tech, a well-known and respected brand in the immigrant community, helps an important sector of the American population. The business is developing cutting-edge offers and solutions for this group that, both linguistically and culturally, demystify and provide access to previously out-of-reach opportunities like financial, medical, and educational resources.

According to Amir Hemmat, Co-Founder, President, and CEO of Welcome Tech, the company is using its own data and technology to develop a platform that addresses pressing issues with the immigration system and advances society. Education and financial services form the foundation of their ecosystem. He continued by saying that in order to fulfill their objective of building a world where anyone can prosper anywhere, they had attracted top-tier investors and employed a diverse and highly skilled team.

The co-founders' and the brand's backgrounds are both firmly ingrained in Welcome Tech's dedication to enhancing the lives of immigrants and their families. Its first consumer-facing brand, SABEResPODER, which translates to "Knowledge is Power," is an immigrant platform that offers educational materials to the Hispanic community and is well-known and trusted in the United States. By developing essential products and solutions, Welcome Tech advances the SABEResPODER services model to more effectively handle this developing industry.

With the long-term goal of creating wealth that will last across generations, Welcome Tech's commitment, strategy, and solution portfolio are having a significant impact on the drive for financial inclusion in this underserved market.

Digital banking services for immigrants

Along with Green Dot Corporation, Welcome Tech opened a bank account. The PODERcard account and Visa card, which aim to reduce the banking divide for immigrants, will be made available to American Hispanic consumers first. Less than 50% of American homes with Hispanics are "fully banked," according to the most recent FDIC National Survey. PODERcard provides affordable financial services and an encounter designed to enable this community to access banking services that are specific to them, with the goal of improving that statistic.

The majority of banking products are catered to the wealthy; as a result, people with fewer financial resources or those who are new to banking are disproportionately affected by monthly maintenance and overdraft fees, as well as minimum deposit requirements. Only 44% of respondents in a recent Welcome Tech study of 10,000 immigrants said they used credit cards, while 54% said they saved money. Only 31% of them decided to borrow money from banks, demonstrating a steadfast mistrust of conventional financial institutions.

The problems that Welcome Tech is attempting to solve are those ones.

Their distinctive strategy is underpinned by data obtained from in-house-developed software that examines tens of thousands of member interactions each day. With the help of this information, the team has been able to create unique user insights into fair and affordable personalized financial services.

The PODERcard, according to Amir Hemmat, is one of many actions our customers will take to ensure a more stable financial future for themselves and their families. It's more than just a debit card or mobile bank account. In order to guarantee that immigrant populations have access to fair and safe financial options, he continued, they were challenging the status quo.

A brief biography of the President and CEO

Amir Hemmat is the Co-founder, President, and CEO of Welcome Tech.