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Beast Industries Acquires Finance App Step
Courtesy of Step
MrBeast’s Beast Industries has made its first major acquisition in the fintech space with a deal for the banking app Step.
The Big Picture: MrBeast (real name Jimmy Donaldson) is building a serious financial services and education business, launching a YouTube channel dedicated to personal finance and investing. He hopes to give young users — i.e., the majority of his 466 million subscribers — the tools to become financially literate.
Behind The App: Step’s mobile-only banking platform is targeted at Gen Z and Gen Alpha, making it a fitting acquisition for MrBeast.
Step will help power Donaldson’s “MrBeast Financial” by providing the creator with a regulated financial platform that already handles things like savings accounts and credit cards. That saves a lot of time and paperwork.
From there, MrBeast will be able to build out his investment bank, advisory firm, and crypto exchange, per Tubefilter.
For Step, it’s a chance for the company with a $5 billion valuation to supercharge its customer-acquisition for basically no money. All MrBeast has to do is post a video saying, “Hey, all! Sign up!”
Final Transaction: It’s possible that Donaldson knows he won’t be able to keep up his insane YouTube stunts forever (or even much longer), so he’s methodically building a business that’s more stable and more within his control — spanning consumer products, premium shows, and, yes, financial services. As Forbes points out, the next era of MrBeast may be all about “financial literacy as content.”
The Future: MrBeast may one day switch from giving out cash in his videos to distributing loans tailored to the unique financial struggles of his followers that traditional banks overlook. Teach a fan to fish…
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Today’s email was written by David Vendrell.
Edited by Nick Comney. Polled and Copy-edited by Kait Cunniff.
Published by Darline Salazar.