Empowering Financial Mobility Inside Atomic with CEO Jordan Wright

Episode Overview

Jordan Wright is the CEO and co-founder of Atomic, a pioneering fintech company dedicated to transforming how consumers manage their finances. With a deep passion for problem-solving and an entrepreneurial spirit that has been evident since his youth, Jordan has always been driven by the desire to create impactful solutions. He graduated from Brigham Young University (BYU) with a degree in Statistics, but his journey in fintech began much earlier, during his time working full-time at a startup while completing his education. His first major venture was UnBill, a platform designed to help users organize and automatically pay their bills. UnBill quickly gained traction and was acquired by Q2 in 2017, marking Jordan’s first significant success in the fintech world.

Jordan’s professional journey is deeply influenced by his two-year LDS mission in São Paulo, Brazil, where he was exposed to diverse communities and learned the value of service and leadership. This experience played a crucial role in shaping his commitment to creating products that improve people’s lives. At Atomic, Jordan focuses on developing tools that simplify complex financial processes, such as switching banks and managing subscriptions. His leadership at Atomic is guided by the company’s mission to champion upward financial mobility for everyone, with a particular emphasis on helping the most financially vulnerable.

Under Jordan’s leadership, Atomic has become a leader in the fintech space, partnering with major banks and financial institutions to offer innovative solutions to millions of consumers across the United States. His vision for the future of finance is centered on creating a seamless, integrated experience where consumers can manage all aspects of their financial lives through a single platform. By focusing on customer needs and leveraging cutting-edge technology, Jordan and his team at Atomic are not just building tools—they’re redefining the way people interact with their money. His dedication to both business success and social impact makes him a respected figure in the fintech community.

Episode Transcript

Jordan Wright: We want the financial services app to be mission control for all of my interactions with everything that I pay. So instead of me having to leave to go leave my bank or fintech app.

 Kevin Rosenqvist: Hey, welcome to Pay Pod, where we bring you conversations with the trailblazers shaping the future of payments and fintech. My name is Kevin Rosenqvist and thanks for listening. Every so often I meet someone who has an incredible desire to help people. It’s something I can almost feel like it’s radiating from them. Most recently, I met Jordan Wright, CEO and co-founder of atomic, a company that builds products designed to help consumers better understand and manage their finances with products like switch, which helps consumers more easily switch banking information for direct deposits and manage an upcoming product that will allow people to organize subscriptions and get a handle on their finances. Jordan and his team hope to level the playing field and improve the financial lives of everyone. So let’s get to my fascinating interview with Jordan Wright. So, Jordan, you graduated from BYU with a degree in stats, and you took your two year mission to Sao Paulo, Brazil. I’m not. I’m not LDS, but I’m always fascinated by that aspect of it. What was that like, spending two years in Brazil at such a young person?

Jordan Wright: Yeah. , and to be clear, I did those kind of in reverse order. So I went to Brazil first, and then I came back and did my college experience at BYU. Brazil is an incredible country and made even more so by just the fact that you’re there as a missionary. And so it’s kind of like you’re walking around with a little bit of a shield on. You can go into places that I would never go as a tourist and, and see things and enjoy parts of that life that maybe you would never want to do or even get close to as a tourist. But it’s an incredible opportunity to see people’s lives change in front of you, see drug addicts, you know, get cleaned see people that have struggled with different things over their lives, make changes and decide to be different people, and you get to be a facilitator there at the age of 18, 19, 20 years old. And it’s a really neat experience. I wouldn’t trade it for anything. So glad I got the opportunity to go.

 Kevin Rosenqvist: Did you choose Brazil? Does it? Did it get chosen for you? Do you have options? How does that work?

Jordan Wright: So I did not choose Brazil. You send in your availability and your location is chosen for you.

 Kevin Rosenqvist: Oh, okay. Wow. That’s that’s really cool though I mean I it’s, it’s something that is like it’s kind of a foreign concept to those of us who are not LDS and, and but it’s also like, you know what? Kid doesn’t want to travel at least a little bit at that age because missionary work can be, you know, it’s not all easy, I would imagine. I imagine it’s not all I’m sure there’s a lot of difficulties involved with it.

Jordan Wright: You got that right. It’s not a it’s not hiking the Alps in Europe, that’s for sure. Right., it’s,, every day you wake up at 6: 30, you’re in bed By 10: 30. It’s a little bit more military in terms of the lifestyle. Not that you’re actually it’s just in terms of the agenda, right. You have like eight hours off a week to do laundry and, and, you know, maybe do something enjoyable for the day. The other stuff was enjoyable for me too, but just go do something kind of fun. And yeah, let your hair down a little bit. Yeah. But I mean, you’re seven days a week. You’re on Tuesday. For me it was Tuesday through Sunday and then Monday from 10: 30 to 5, you’re free to do a few things that you need to do. And then from then on from everything else is just it’s not it’s not beach.

 Kevin Rosenqvist: Bonfires and soccer games.

Jordan Wright: No, it’s not beach bonfires and soccer games. Correct.

 Kevin Rosenqvist: Kudos to you. That’s not an easy thing to do. So yeah. Well thank you for sharing that. That’s always something that I find fascinating. So,, after about four years in the working world, you founded UN Bill, which helps people organize their bills and automatically pay them. Very cool idea, for sure. What? What led you there? What led you to found Unbel?

Jordan Wright: Yeah. So, you know, one of my earliest journal entries is actually a business idea that I had. I think I’ve always been had a desire to start a company. So that’s always been in me. And probably like most of my journal entries as a kid, they’re sparse. Right. Dear diary sort of moments. But they’re always like business ideas. I converted my parents barn into Hogwarts Castle and brought kids in and made them wands and hung broomsticks from rafters and, you know, nothing approved by any sort of regulatory body in terms of safety. But it was a wonderful time. Delightful time for me. So I think that that’s always been in me. And so when I went to school, I actually worked full time at a startup and studied at BYU full time as well. And so I graduated in four years. And those were the four years I spent working at that startup. And right is right after. Right. As I graduated, I began working on this company and initially actually started as helping roommates find apartments together And we pivoted into the helping roommates split and pay their bills. And that was an opportunity that we saw. And from a it was one of those moments where,, you know, I think Andy Grove talks about this as in Intel’s history, but as they were in the,, the memory business and they were deciding to get into the chip business, and Andy Grove took his founder out, one of the founders out of Intel, I think, and they were having a conversation.

Jordan Wright: And he said, if you were fired today and you were put back in place tomorrow, what would you do differently? And the co-founder said, oh, I would chase the chip business immediately. And he said, then what are we still doing in the memory business? And I think that it was similar for us. We had we were kind of going down both paths. And my co-founder and I, Scott Weiner, and I were talking together one, one afternoon, one afternoon, I think it was or morning. I still remember we were sitting on these rocking chairs in front of this,, like old Texas. It was in Texas and Austin at the time. This like little Rambler house that we had rented out as an office space. And,, and I just asked him, like, what are we? You know, like, if we were fired today, what would we come in and do tomorrow? He’s like, oh, for sure, it’s the payment stuff. I’m like, then what are we still doing in that other business? And we shut it down and we moved forward and, and there were lots of neat things that came from that. But I would say the key thing that drove us there initially was customer problem. We love following customer problems and just hearing about the problem. I was going to a lot of college campuses at the time, interviewing students, seeing what their issues were, and it was very fun to learn about.

 Kevin Rosenqvist: Yeah. Have you  always had an interest in fintech or did that kind of just come about when you guys started kind of ideating these, these potential business ideas?

Jordan Wright: Yeah, I would not say I had an interest in fintech, I had an interest in customer problems. And that led me to fintech.

 Kevin Rosenqvist: Okay. Yeah and you guys were acquired relatively quickly.

Jordan Wright: Yeah. Relatively quickly. I mean within four years I think of starting the company. Yeah. And we sold it in January 2017 to Q2 out of Austin, Texas. It’s really fascinating, too, because frankly, I mean, just in the spirit of full candor here, we were like a month away from running out of cash when we were when we were acquired. And it had taken longer than we thought. And so we didn’t fundraise as we probably should have. And first time entrepreneurs and making a bunch of mistakes. And there were a couple of times in between where we thought the whole thing was done. , but we went and demoed at Finovate fall in New York, and it was crazy because it was a local Austin company that had never heard of us, and I had never heard of them. That reached out to me and said, we should talk. And I remember I still remember at the time they told us, you know, our company is focused on connections, conversations and commerce. Those are the three things. And if, if a if a opportunity to acquire a company comes up that fits each one of those buckets we want, we are looking very heavily and provided them with more connections into merchants and allowed them to have different conversations with their consumers and then it allowed them to participate in commerce by interchange revenue for their customers. And so we kind of all three of those buckets. And I think it became a no brainer for them from an acquisition standpoint.

 Kevin Rosenqvist: So you are you more of a tech guy? Are you a business guy? A little bit of both. Or what’s your what’s your background?

Jordan Wright: Uh, so at the startup I was at in college, , and in college I studied statistics. And then at the startup I was at in college, I was a product person. And so, , and also did a little bit of sales engineering work. So technical sales work with the startup I was involved in at the time. And I,, and so that the nice thing was I hung out with eight engineers all day, every day. And it made me decently technical, at least able to go toe to toe with a few people on how things work. , but I would say that in terms of,, I’m, I’m not a programmer. I actually wrote a couple lines of code in our first company just for the fun of it. But I’m definitely more of a business guy. I love product market fit conversations, which is why I love customer problems. Right? I love being able to go in there and I ideate on something that’s going to be possible. And then seeing that come to fruition, that is my favorite part of anything I’ve ever done.

 Kevin Rosenqvist: And then you founded atomic in 2019. And the company mission is to help the most financially vulnerable. What do you mean by that?

Jordan Wright: Yeah. And I’ll need to make a correction here, Kevin. Slightly because we changed our mission in the last year, but initially it was out of the gate. It was to help the most financially vulnerable. And our thought process here was there’s the underbanked. There are people that aren’t that are unbanked. Right. It’s very expensive to be in that category. And we were very hopeful that some of our solutions would make for a more competitive world, for those consumers and allow them better access to financial services. So direct deposit is removing friction. Direct deposit switching, which is one of our first product, removes some of the friction from changing banks And so we were very excited about the possibility of getting a consumer to be able to move banks more easily, because you’ve probably had this experience, I know I have of getting charged a fee where I felt I didn’t deserve one from a bank and calling them, and they’ll be like, okay, I’ll get rid of half the fee, or like just telling you to pound sand because it’s so difficult for you to move banks. And so our thought process was, if we can get this to become easier for consumers, then we’re going to help consumers. The only way to do that is actually to work with the banks to get it done. And so that’s one thing. But we also wanted so that was a key thing for us early on. And our first customer to go live was Chime who had a similar mission to us.

Jordan Wright: Right. And we work with lots of other mission driven companies. A lot of the earned wage access companies are our customers, right? Those sorts of folks that I think have at their heart, the heart of their companies, a very strong mission. Now, some of these companies, you might be able to argue, I don’t know, is that really net positive? I’m not certain. I’m not for certain on that, but I do know that a lot of them really want to be able to provide a better future for consers. And so initially it was let’s help the most financially vulnerable people in the United States. Well, then we launched, we moved forward, and within a couple of years, we start having US Bank and Bank of America and all these other really large banks knocking on our door, and we have to start revisiting our mission or our business model would not have lasted. , you know, you can’t have those incongruities between your business model and your mission. And so we started to take a really hard look at what that might what a change to our our statement, our mission statement would look like. And now our mission statement is to champion upward financial mobility for everyone. And when we look at that as a mission statement, it includes it’s inclusive of our financially vulnerable that we’re trying to serve, but it’s also inclusive of the many people that are on different, varying class levels that we might be able to help and impact.

 Kevin Rosenqvist: We’ve talked on this podcast before with other guests about underbanked people and financially vulnerable people and stuff like that. And it almost seems, I think to a lot of people, it seems impossible that it would be difficult for someone to, to to get a bank account or to be underbanked. Why is this such a problem in this country?

Jordan Wright: Yeah, there are lots of reasons. One of them is, you know, we just look at the number of immigrants we have in this country. Those immigrants don’t have a normal path towards getting a bank account. I think that’s a big one. I’m really excited about one of our customers who’s solving some, some really neat problems in that space specifically for Latin American immigrants. But, you know, when we look at when I look at other people, other issues, though, there’s trust in a financial services system. System issues. Right. And so we might come in and just say you should just be able to explain that issue away. But for a lot of people, trust has been degraded in the system over the many years that their family has participated in in some way, shape or form. And so, , but in addition to that, I mean, it’s just that it’s costly. You have to have minimum balances. A lot of these accounts that some of these people are like, I’m never going to have that. So I’m going to be charged $5 a month or $10 a month just for my account. Right. So there’s lots of other things contributing to this, but those are three that I would lay out there.

 Kevin Rosenqvist: With more alternative payment options, neobanks things like that becoming a thing. This is this all heading towards a world where we can have way less and get more people into, you know, better situations.

Jordan Wright: Yeah, I definitely think it is headed to a world where and I think that when I look at some of the solutions that will come to market within these neobanks, and this might be a good opportunity to talk about a couple of things that we’re doing, because it once the tools are there to help these people actually be better with their money, then I think that that will draw them right. So if we can actually help them be better with their money and provide savings for them on a monthly basis, they’re going to want to participate in that system, but right now it’s a net negative for them. So here’s some examples of how this how we feel this might work. So atomic has three main pillars we’re building off of. The first is to help our customers. That’s financial institutions lead on primacy and fintech companies right. Primacy being that we want their they want their checking account, their cards to be the primary financial instrument the consumer is using, or for their account to be the most commonly accessed by that consumer, things like that. So then you look at that and you say, okay, so that’s what these people want to accomplish. That’s what our customers want to accomplish. And so our direct deposit and also our payment switching products help them do that. On the payment switching product front, we have the ability so that when somebody signs up for a new checking account, we can move all their payments over from the last account to the new account, ACH, debit card, that sort of stuff, as well as credit card payments. Right. So now we’re making it a lot easier for someone to move from one place to another. Now, in addition to that, we’re also coming out with later this year a subscription management model that we are very excited about.

 Kevin Rosenqvist: I saw that on your website and I was like, that’s that’s a great it’s a great idea.

Jordan Wright: Thank you Kevin. Yeah, it’s one of those features that, as you asked your question, immediately came to mind for me when we’re. And the reason that we came up with this was actually I was at a conference with a friend of mine sitting down, and, and I just said, what are your biggest takeaways from the last year? He had just he had just rolled out of one company and he was thinking about starting a new company. And he said, probably the most insightful question I heard this last year is I was just researching was people talking to someone and they said, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I get that. The bank makes my money secure. I get that the bank gives me a mediocre interest rate. Right. But how does the bank actually help me be better with my money? And that question resonated me with me a ton. And I kept thinking about it and thinking about it. Yeah.

 Kevin Rosenqvist: And we really think about we never really talk about.

Jordan Wright: No, we don’t like. And banks don’t help us be better with our money. Right. Pfm was supposed to do this for us. You know, these financial management tools. And really what they end up doing is they end up saying to us, your life sucks right now because you don’t have enough money to make your next five payments you need. Right. It’s depressing.

 Kevin Rosenqvist: Yeah, yeah.

Jordan Wright: Yeah, exactly. Or they show you a net negative personal net worth balance because you have a mortgage or, you know, like all these sorts of things that like the intention was one thing the execution was. Yeah. So that’s really exciting to us, the possibility of becoming an action layer for PFM, where PFM and all these, you know, like all these groups, fitness, RM plaid, they’ve all yodlee, they’ve all done a good job making data available. Right. But now something has to happen to be able to enable them to be able to make it actionable. And so the second of our three pillars is we are seeking to find ways to power the initiative that a consumer has to make good financial choices. So if they see that coming up and the FM or the data system says you’re going to be low on your bills and then says, but you can cancel this bill, you can change the billing date on this thing. You can do these three things right. That’s what we want to be. And I think when we start creating those sorts of tools for consumers, they’re going to want to come back to the they’re going to want to participate in the financial system because people will say, hey, this company saved me $200 a year, and for a bank or a financial or a fintech to be able to come or like at the end of the year with a statement that says, here’s how much we paid you in interest and here’s how much we saved you. That’s amazing.

 Kevin Rosenqvist: Yeah. And that’s something I think that’s changed so much in the past. You know, I don’t know, you know, ten years, 15 years of streaming platforms and all these, you know, SaaS companies and stuff like that. I mean, there’s sometimes where I look at my and I’m like, oh God, I forgot. I forgot about that one. You know, like I don’t I haven’t used that in a while. I should probably get rid of that, you know? Or or just like when you really break it down and you’re like, how many streaming services do we have and which ones do we actually watch anymore? You know, we don’t have time. We have a three year old, I don’t have time to watch all this stuff. So like to have it in front of you is rare because unless you’re looking at your, your checking your, your balance and you’re, you’re actually going through and looking at everything, there’s really no, you know, way to aggregate it all and see it in one spot.

Jordan Wright: That’s correct. And when some of you know, a lot of large banks specifically and fintech companies are looking at how do we create a hub of sorts. Apple’s done a great job of this. How do we create a hub where I can see all my subscriptions that are being paid out and I can my co-founder has a great example for this or an analogy for this. He says, like, we want the financial services app to be mission control for all of my interactions with everything that I pay. So instead of me having to leave to go leave my bank or fintech app in order to engage with, you know, Netflix or Amazon or any one of these. Why can’t I engage with those through my financial services app? Right. And that’s what’s really that gets me really exciting because we’re going to improve people’s lives. And it’s the world I want to live in. I want to live in a world where I can take care of all of that from there. And so by the end of this year, we should have access to over 100 million consumers in the United States via our customers. And so the people at our company get to work on solutions every day. That’s like, my friend is going to use this, not like ten years from now.

Jordan Wright: It’ll be next year or the year after that. My friends and family might start looking at, hey, I want to bank wherever it is you built that tool. So where it offers that, right? And now we work with six of the top ten banks in the United States to be able to offer this. But we also work with more than half of the largest fintechs in the United States. We also work with a broad swath of the small regional financial institutions in the United States. We have partnerships with a lot of the main online banking providers. So it’s just our reach is exciting and our ability to be able to get this out there and give consumers the ability to control these sorts of things. One quick example on that front, so like you mentioned, oh my gosh, I don’t I don’t remember signing up for that. This spring the NFL bought rights to a game or Peacock bought rights to an NFL game this spring, a playoff game and so on a Saturday or Sunday. Everybody signed up for Peacock just so they can watch this one NFL game. I did that.

 Kevin Rosenqvist: Last year for the Miami Dolphins., Chiefs game.

Jordan Wright: There you go. So if your bank had come to you on Monday and said, we hope you enjoyed the game this weekend, would you like us to pause that subscription until the next major Peacock sporting event? Automatically, yeah. How would that experience have been? Yeah, I.

 Kevin Rosenqvist: Actually ended up paying for, I think I only paid for one extra month of Peacock, so I was proud of you that I actually remembered to do it. But yeah, totally. I mean, yeah, that’s a great example of that.

Jordan Wright: Yeah. So anyway, those are the sorts of things that and one more funny example, as I was interviewing one of our employees on this question and I know how much all of our employees make. And so I went and interviewed everybody about their subscriptions. And one of them says to me, and I know how much money she makes, and it’s not a massive amount of money. She makes good money, but it’s not massive. And she says to me, I know that there’s a $1,200 a year savings sitting in my cell phone plan, and I’m like $1,200 for somebody that makes sub $75,000 a year is significant. Yeah. Yeah. Right. And so I’m kind of like, wow. You know, like with pain on my face, why not change that? You know. And she’s like I’m just lazy. And we want to look down our noses a little bit at these people and say, gosh, you know, like that’s terrible of your finances. Well, I looked at mine, turn the turn the lens around on myself. And I’m like, well, I’ve got like $3,000 worth a year that when I look at it, I am I’m, I am poorly optimizing. And so all of us have these things in our lives that I think about it as the AI agent model that says there should be an AI agent that’s actively pursuing opportunities to make my financial life better, and I’m so excited we’re going to be able to pull it off in the next couple of years for, for a lot of American consumers.

 Kevin Rosenqvist: Yeah. That’s awesome. So I think I might I think I interrupted you because I was excited to talk about that, but I think you said there’s three pillars. So I think we didn’t get. Thanks for taking me.

Jordan Wright: Back to it, Kevin. We did not. You’re right. So the only.

 Kevin Rosenqvist: Pillar here, man, we gotta get all the pillars. Yeah.

Jordan Wright: That’s right. A two legged stool will not work. Not gonna work. So the third pillar is expanding access. And so our user permissioned model where somebody can, you know, the interplay is I want you to go do this thing, and we say, okay, then we need this from you so we can go do it. And you choose whether or not you give that to us. And then we go do this on your behalf. And so in some cases, it might be some personally identifiable information we have to give to a merchant to cancel a bill. In other cases, it might be that you need to log into a system so that we can go and take care of a few things inside that system. Right. That’s the exchange between us and consumer. And so that third area of expanding access is about what are the other areas. So we have merchants that we’ve talked about. We’ve talked about payroll systems for direct deposit. , what are the other areas that we can go do this for? And one of the really neat examples we did with H&R block this last year was if I’m a customer of H&R block or if I’m a prospective customer of H&R block, the biggest thing holding me back from filing taxes at H&R block is that last year I filed them with TurboTax or with somebody else, and they already have my employment information, my income information, which credits that I had kids like, they already have all that information.

 Kevin Rosenqvist: Yeah, it’s a lot faster of a process because you don’t have to reenter so much stuff.

Jordan Wright: Yeah, exactly. And so what if we could import your all of your tax return from last year from H&R block or from TurboTax into H&R block, and in milliseconds, they can pre-populate your return. So you’re getting a repeat customer experience, even if you’ve never been a customer there before. Right? And so that’s one thing we enabled this last year to expand access, and we have other thoughts on other things we can expand access into in the future. That are really exciting to us. But I would say like, we’re just continually looking with our customers for opportunities to expand access in other ways. So the three pillars are lead on primacy, power initiative and expand access.

 Kevin Rosenqvist: Yeah. And I really like the manage product is very, very cool. And yeah, I think what you guys are doing is great. You seem to have a genuine desire to want to help, you know, between your mission and you know, your outlook at solving customer problems. I was on your website, you guys do some company philanthropy and is it that just an innate thing? Does that come from somewhere specific, do you think in you?

Jordan Wright: It definitely comes from my religious background, from my parents. You know, even I would say even more than my religious background is probably my parents. But both are, you know, a huge part of it. Jesus said that we should love everyone and not and and one of my favorite phrases is that organized love is better than general concern. General concern. And in order for our love to make changes in the world, it needs to get organized. And in my case, you know, I’m pretty driven individual. One of our investors core innovation capital is a mission driven venture fund. They do incredible. They do incredible investments that they want. They want to perform at the same levels of Sequoia. But while having a mission, they talk about wanting to find people that are mercenary but also missionary. And if you can find somebody that has that intense drive to to perform well and succeed, but equal to it, an intense desire to do good in the world and make the world a better place. If you can put those into a business model, that’s when those, like so many that are so missionary, don’t put it into a business model that can succeed. And they’re endlessly fund raising and dependent on outside sources, as opposed to be able to create a model that perpetuates it. And so my desire is certainly to find a way to create a model that perpetuates doing good and helping people financially. And I do think that when you liberate people financially, when you help them financially, then it makes them free to go chase other things. I have concerns based on my own experience that when I get more free financially, I waste my time sometimes. But I also have more time to be at my kid’s sporting events. I have more time to do a couple of other things that are very important to me that I’m very grateful for.

 Kevin Rosenqvist: Yeah, it does open up some doors when you have your financial, you know, your financial life in order organized as you said. Yeah, yeah. Well, Jordan, thank you so much for being here. Thank you for talking about atomic. I think what you’re doing is awesome. And,, yeah, we’d love to have you on again sometime and check in. And thanks for being here.
Jordan Wright: Thank you. Kevin, it’s a pleasure