“That’s when we put all our experience together to bring STACK to life.”Īfter 18 months of development, STACK launched in 2018. “After spending a number of years in financial services, we understood some of the gaps that prevented traditional institutions from really delivering a compelling product, especially to millennials,” says Dinh. The 2008 recession caused the initiative to be shelved, but the idea stuck with both Dinh and Pavletic. “After Virgin Mobile launched in Canada in 2005, Richard Branson, the founder, was really looking to roll out his Virgin Money financial services brand across the country,” Dinh explains. The inspiration for STACK occurred while Dinh and Pavletic were colleagues at Virgin. Sarai went on to jobs at CIBC and President’s Choice Financial, where he worked on innovations in mobile banking and “all the new stuff to help people pay and think about their money with digital technology.” “I helped lead product development efforts at Mastercard for about seven years and by the end of it, I was involved in technologies like Apple Pay, Google Pay and Samsung Pay.” For Dinh, this happened at Virgin Mobile Canada and Mastercard Canada. “There were a lot of challenges initially trying to figure out what our first job was going to be out of university.”Īfter graduation, Sarai and Dinh gained proficiency in application development, mobile strategy development and financial technology. “While we were studying, fields that we were expecting to really thrive were facing a huge downturn,” says Dinh. They both enrolled at Concordia in 1999 just before the dot-com bust - Sarai in software engineering and Dinh in computer engineering - and were employed at financial institutions throughout the global recession of 2007-08. Sarai and Dinh have dealt with unprecedented global events before. “In the first round, we had over a dozen local merchants across the country get their businesses known.” Lessons from the past We told them they could post their offer on STACK and we would waive all our set-up fees,” says Sarai. “We put a call out to help power local businesses. The co-founders also launched a campaign to help local businesses crippled by COVID-19. “So all your benefits come directly to STACK, which makes it a lot easier and quicker.” “With STACK, clients can click one button and we’ll load their information on their behalf to the Canada Revenue Agency,” says Sarai, the company’s CPO (chief product officer). For example, they have facilitated a way for users to get direct Canada Emergency Response Benefit (CERB) deposits. ‘Power local businesses’ĭinh, his co-founders and STACK’s approximately 50 employees have reacted quickly to help the app’s users, as well as local businesses, manage pandemic-related financial adversity. “We had to ensure that we were compliant with provincial financial regulations and French-language standards, including having the appropriate customer-facing materials and staffing up our customer-care team with bilingual agents,” explains Dinh, who serves as STACK’s COO. Deployment in Quebec took a bit more time. The fee-free app, which doubles as a prepaid Mastercard, was first introduced across most of Canada in 2018. Now STACK, a mobile app newly launched in Quebec by developers Ranjit Sarai, BEng 03, Nicolas Dinh, BEng 03, and Miro Pavletic, wants to simplify how consumers save and spend. For many, financial insecurity provoked by COVID-19 has aggravated the challenge. It is also interesting to note that this number is approximately 13 times the amount of US currency in circulation, according to the Treasury bulletin, which lists the amount at $853.6 billion as of December 31, 2008.Even under normal circumstances, household money management can be difficult. If the amount was laid out, the area of the $1 bills would cover the state of Rhode Island three times over, and in $100 bills the amount would carpet about 3/4 the area of Washington DC. If consolidated into a single stack of $1 bills, it would measure about 749,666 miles, which is enough to reach from the earth to the moon twice (at perigee), with a few billion dollars left to spare. At this height, it would create a block of bills with a base approximately twice the size of the Empire State Building's, which is just under the size of three American football fields. If denominated in $1 bills, the cash would stack as high as the tallest building in the world, the 2683.7 foot Burj Dubai skyscraper… 1,474,918 times. $11,046,247,657,049.48 (According to US Treasury Direct, 3/26/09) The mounting US National debt, growing by billions every day, has recently topped the $11 trillion mark.
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